The La Center 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.
Sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
12° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1923. Next is 16° in 1997.
La Center’s center stands about 370 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 330 ft to 430 ft, a difference of 100 ft: gently rolling country.
The section below crosses 4 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.
Fine-detrital. Age: Tertiary to Holocene, less than 66 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 84 million years old. About 1 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 Center reaches the Gulf of America by way of Hinkle Creek, Humphrey Creek, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,000 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of La Center; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
La Center has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. A normal year brings about 7 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 49 inches of water.
On November 14 La Center normally reaches 58° and falls to 39°. The record high is 75°, in 1999; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.04 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1923 at Olmsted Lock And Dam, 9 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
