The Gilson 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
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76° on Nov. 11, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1896. Next is 74° in 2020.
Gilson’s center stands about 680 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 600 ft to 730 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Carbondale Formation (shale, sandstone, coal), from the Middle Pennsylvanian to Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 315 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 60×. 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, sandstone, coal. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian to Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 315 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Early Pennsylvanian to Middle Pennsylvanian, 307 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 307 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 Gilson reaches the Gulf of America by way of Little Haw Creek, Haw Creek, Fox Creek, the Illinois and the Mississippi: about 1,400 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Gilson; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Gilson has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 14° in January. A normal year brings about 25 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 Gilson normally reaches 50° and falls to 31°. The record high is 71°, in 2011; the record low 12°, in 1900. The most rain on this date, 0.45 in, fell in 1902.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1896 at Knoxville, 5 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
