The Hawesville 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.
13° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1972. Next is 14° in 1986.
Hawesville’s center stands about 530 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 360 ft to 660 ft, a difference of 300 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Greybill Hill, about 860 ft, 10 miles east-northeast.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 48×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 0.3 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 Hawesville reaches the Gulf of America by way of Lead Creek, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,230 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 Hawesville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Hawesville has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. A normal year brings about 11 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 49 inches of water.
On November 14 Hawesville normally reaches 57° and falls to 38°. The record high is 73°, in 1973; the record low 13°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.21 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1972 at Cannelton, 3 miles east, 130 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.