The Jo Daviess 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.
80° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1898. Next is 75° in 2012.
Jo Daviess’s center stands about 1,100 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,060 ft to 1,120 ft, a difference of 60 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Upper Ordovician (limestone, dolostone), from the Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 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 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, dolostone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone, sandstone. Age: Middle Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 445 to 471 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Dolostone, sandstone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 94 to 113 million years old. About 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 Jo Daviess reaches the Gulf of America by way of Badger Creek, the Blue Earth, the Minnesota and the Mississippi: about 2,040 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Jo Daviess; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Jo Daviess has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 6° in January. A normal year brings about 47 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 34 inches of water.
On November 14 Jo Daviess normally reaches 43° and falls to 26°. The record high is 80°, in 1999; the record low −7°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.26 in, fell in 1909.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1898 at Winnebago, 9 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.