The Lakeland 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
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
22° on Nov. 15, 1963, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1956. Next is 24° in 1969.
Lakeland’s center stands about 200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 160 ft to 240 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pleistocene-Pliocene sands and gravels (sand, gravel), from the Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 5.3 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 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, gravel. Age: Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 5.3 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Clay, sand, gravel. Age: Tertiary Neogene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Dolostone, sand, clay. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 0.7 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 Lakeland reaches the Gulf of America by way of Mill Creek, Big Creek, the Alapaha and the Suwannee: about 210 river miles.
130 miles of the trip are on the Suwannee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lakeland; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lakeland has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 37° in January. About 49 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Lakeland normally reaches 71° and falls to 45°. The record high is 89°, in 1956; the record low 26°, in 1963. The most rain on this date, 1.41 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1956 at Homerville 5 N, 16 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
