The Lake City 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.
5.74 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1892. The next wettest, 3.40 inches, fell in 1979.
Lake City’s center stands about 200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 90 ft to 230 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Hawthorn Group, Statenville Formation (sand), from the Middle Miocene to Late Miocene, 5.3 to 16 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. Age: Middle Miocene to Late Miocene, 5.3 to 16 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million 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.
A raindrop that lands in Lake City reaches the Gulf of America by way of Clay Hole Creek, the Ichetucknee, the Santa Fe and the Suwannee: about 100 river miles.
65 miles of the trip are on the Suwannee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lake City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lake City has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 41° in January. About 54 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Lake City normally reaches 72° and falls to 49°. The record high is 86°, in 1986; the record low 29°, in 1963. The most rain on this date, 1.83 in, fell in 1949.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 at Lake City 2 E, 3 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.