The St. Lucas 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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73° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 73° in 2012.
St. Lucas’s center stands about 1,070 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 950 ft to 1,200 ft, a difference of 250 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Maquoketa formation (shale, dolostone), from the Late Ordovician, 447 to 454 million 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 58×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, dolostone. Age: Late Ordovician, 447 to 454 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Middle Devonian to Late Devonian, 374 to 388 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Silurian, 440 to 445 million years old. About 1 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 St. Lucas reaches the Gulf of America by way of Bass Creek, the Turkey and the Mississippi: about 1,680 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of St. Lucas; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
St. Lucas has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 6° in January. A normal year brings about 41 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 St. Lucas normally reaches 45° and falls to 25°. The record high is 73°, in 1999; the record low −3°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.68 in, fell in 1927.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Fayette, 14 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
