The Lonsdale 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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16° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1883. Next is 19° in 1907.
Lonsdale’s center stands about 440 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 370 ft to 810 ft, a difference of 440 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Blowout Mountain, about 1,270 ft, 14 miles west.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 24×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Black-shale. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Chert, shale. Age: Middle Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 445 to 471 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Black-shale, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Novaculite. Age: Late Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 384 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 Lonsdale reaches the Gulf of America by way of Tenmile Creek, the South Fork Saline, the Alum Fork Saline, the Saline, the Ouachita, the Black River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 610 river miles.
200 miles of the trip are on the Saline.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lonsdale; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lonsdale has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 29° in January. About 58 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Lonsdale normally reaches 62° and falls to 39°. The record high is 89°, in 1999; the record low 16°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 3.20 in, fell in 1980.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1883 at Malvern, 10 miles south, 140 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
