The Gary 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.
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Sunny
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Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
76° on Nov. 11, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1989. Next is 73° in 1989.
Gary’s center stands about 600 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 570 ft to 640 ft, a difference of 70 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Muscatatuck Group (limestone, dolostone), from the Devonian, 359 to 422 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.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 6 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.
Gary straddles the St. Lawrence Divide. Rain on the southeast side runs to Lake Michigan; most of the rest goes to the Gulf of America.
From the center of town, a raindrop reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Calumet, the Calumet Sag Channel, the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, the Des Plaines, the Illinois and the Mississippi: about 1,530 river miles. One that lands on the southeast side reaches Lake Michigan by way of the Portage-Burns Waterway: about 7 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
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 Gary; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Gary has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 40 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 39 inches of water.
On November 14 Gary normally reaches 49° and falls to 35°. The record high is 73°, in 1989; the record low 15°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.29 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1989 at Indiana Dunes National Park, 14 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
