The Rock River 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.
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Mostly sunny; warmer
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70° on Nov. 11, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1987. Next is 64° in 1990.
Rock River’s center stands about 980 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 860 ft to 1,110 ft, a difference of 250 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Prairie du Chien Group (dolostone), from the Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old.
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 34×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Dolostone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 497 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 497 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion 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 Rock River reaches Lake Superior by way of South Branch Slapneck Creek, Slapneck Creek and the Au Train: about 30 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 Rock River; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Rock River has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 78° in July; winter nights fall to about 7° in February. A normal year brings about 164 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 35 inches of water.
On November 14 Rock River normally reaches 41° and falls to 26°. The record high is 60°, in 1999; the record low 11°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.63 in, fell in 2000.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1987 at Chatham Experiment Farm 2, 3 miles east, 110 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
