The La Crosse 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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Partly cloudy; warmer
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74° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1961. Next is 73° in 1964.
La Crosse’s center stands about 680 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 660 ft to 700 ft, a difference of 40 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ellsworth Shale, from the Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 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.
Shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 0.9 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 La Crosse reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Kankakee, the Illinois and the Mississippi: about 1,570 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 La Crosse; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
La Crosse has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. A normal year brings about 34 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 La Crosse normally reaches 49° and falls to 31°. The record high is 72°, in 1999; the record low 6°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.15 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1961 at Wanatah 2 WNW, 9 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
