The Lyford 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.
1° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 4° in 1959.
Lyford’s center stands about 550 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 460 ft to 700 ft, a difference of 240 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Carbondale Group (shale, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 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 Lyford reaches the Gulf of America by way of Big Bayou, the Wabash River Old Channel, the Old Channel Wabash, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,320 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lyford; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lyford has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. A normal year brings about 13 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 47 inches of water.
On November 14 Lyford normally reaches 53° and falls to 32°. The record high is 76°, in 1931; the record low 9°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 3.72 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Rockville, 11 miles northeast, 140 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.