The Lawson 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.
Sunny
Chance of showers
Chance of showers; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
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19° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is 20° in 1963.
Lawson’s center stands about 230 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 150 ft to 300 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Claibourne Group (sand, clay), from the Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 million 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 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.
Sand, clay. Age: Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 million years old. About 18 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 6 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 Lawson reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Ouachita, the Black River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 430 river miles.
180 miles of the trip are on the Ouachita.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lawson; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lawson has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 32° in January. About 50 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Lawson normally reaches 66° and falls to 41°. The record high is 83°, in 1971; the record low 19°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 3.02 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1940 at Calion Lock & Dam, 7 miles north, 140 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
