The Lawrence 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; warmer
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
81° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1857. Next is 79° in 1950.
Lawrence’s center stands about 860 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 790 ft to 1,030 ft, a difference of 240 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Coon Point, about 1,110 ft, 10 miles west-northwest.
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 57×. 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 10 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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.
A raindrop that lands in Lawrence reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Wakarusa, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,590 river miles.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lawrence; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lawrence has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 10 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 39 inches of water.
On November 14 Lawrence normally reaches 54° and falls to 34°. The record high is 78°, in 1964; the record low 8°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 2.34 in, fell in 1931.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1857 at Lawrence, here, 190 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
