The Brighton plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
Showers likely
2° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1996. Next is 3° in 2005.
Brighton’s center stands about 1,370 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,270 ft to 1,400 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granite near Cherokee, from the Paleoproterozoic, 1.8 to 1.9 billion years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.8 to 1.9 billion years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Gneiss, amphibolite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 0.4 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Brighton reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Little Eau Pleine, the Wisconsin and the Mississippi: about 1,890 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Petenwell Lake, Lake Wisconsin, Lake Du Bay and Wisconsin River Flowage 4964.
1,610 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Brighton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Brighton has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about 7° in January. About 25 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Brighton normally reaches 42° and falls to 26°. The record high is 62°, in 2025; the record low 4°, in 1996. The most rain on this date, 0.25 in, fell in 2021.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Marshfield Municipal Airport, 12 miles south-southeast, 120 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
