The Dearborn 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.
73° on Nov. 11, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1952. Next is 71° in 1964.
Dearborn’s center stands about 600 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 580 ft to 630 ft, a difference of 50 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Traverse Group (limestone), from the Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 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.
Limestone. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 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 Dearborn reaches Lake Erie by way of the River Rouge and the Detroit: about 20 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Dearborn; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Dearborn has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 31 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 35 inches of water.
On November 14 Dearborn normally reaches 49° and falls to 33°. The record high is 71°, in 1989; the record low 13°, in 1996. The most rain on this date, 0.92 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1952 at Dearborn, 3 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.