The Lawson 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.
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy; warmer
Sunny
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
80° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1981. Next is 75° in 1990.
Lawson’s center stands about 1,070 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 960 ft to 1,080 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Kansas City Group (limestone, shale), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 53×. 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, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.2 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 Lawson reaches the Gulf of America by way of Brushy Creek, the Crooked River, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,550 river miles.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lawson; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lawson has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. About 40 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Lawson normally reaches 54° and falls to 32°. The record high is 80°, in 1999; the record low 11°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.43 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1981 at Smithville Lake, 19 miles west, 170 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
