The Plano 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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1° on Nov. 17, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1887. Next is 3° in 1933.
Plano’s center stands about 650 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 560 ft to 690 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Johnsons Mound, about 900 ft, 15 miles north-northeast.
The section below crosses 6 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.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 454 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 447 to 459 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, limestone, dolostone. Age: Middle Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 454 to 468 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 454 to 459 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Early Ordovician to Middle Ordovician, 459 to 487 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 0.8 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 Plano reaches the Gulf of America by way of Little Rock Creek, the Fox River, the Illinois and the Mississippi: about 1,470 river miles.
Lake on the way: Peoria Lake.
1,190 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Plano; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Plano has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. A normal year brings about 28 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 Plano normally reaches 48° and falls to 32°. The record high is 74°, in 1971; the record low 9°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.65 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1887 at Aurora Water, 14 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
