The Goose Lake 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.
74° on Nov. 11, 1964, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1938. Next is 74° in 2022.
Goose Lake’s center stands about 700 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 650 ft to 850 ft, a difference of 200 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Hopkinton, Blanding, Tete Des Morts, Mosalem formations (dolostone), from the Late Ordovician to Silurian, 434 to 447 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.
Dolostone. Age: Late Ordovician to Silurian, 434 to 447 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 431 to 440 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Shale, dolostone. Age: Late Ordovician, 447 to 454 million 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.
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 Goose Lake reaches the Gulf of America by way of Deep Creek, the Maquoketa and the Mississippi: about 1,540 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Goose Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Goose Lake has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 14° in January. About 34 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Goose Lake normally reaches 48° and falls to 32°. The record high is 73°, in 1989; the record low 7°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.20 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1938 at Fulton L&D # 13, 13 miles east-southeast, 110 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.