The Rolling 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.
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69° on Nov. 17, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1895. Next is 68° in 1964.
Rolling’s center stands about 1,510 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,390 ft to 1,550 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Wolf River Batholith; Anorthosite, from the Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 50×. 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: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Anorthosite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 10 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.
Rolling straddles the St. Lawrence Divide. Rain on the northwest side runs to the Gulf of America; most of the rest goes to Lake Michigan.
From the center of town, a raindrop reaches Lake Michigan by way of the Middle Branch Embarrass, the Embarrass, the Wolf River and the Fox River: about 220 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic. One that lands on the northwest side reaches the Gulf of America by way of Spring Brook, the Eau Claire, the Wisconsin and the Mississippi: about 1,910 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Winnebago 6124, Lake Winneconne and Lake Butte des Morts.
65 miles of the trip are on the Embarrass.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Rolling; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Rolling has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about 7° in January. A normal year brings about 64 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 34 inches of water.
On November 14 Rolling normally reaches 41° and falls to 26°. The record high is 64°, in 1990; the record low −2°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 0.75 in, fell in 1902.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1895 from the Wausau Area threaded record (Wausau Asos, 25 miles west-southwest, 310 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
