The Urbana 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.
19° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is 20° in 1963.
Urbana’s center stands about 150 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 140 ft to 270 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (coarse-detrital, fine-detrital), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 years old.
The section below crosses 4 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 5 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 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 Urbana reaches the Gulf of America by way of Woodard Creek, the Ouachita, the Black River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 420 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 Urbana; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Urbana 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 Urbana 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, 10 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.