The Leslie 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.
5.76 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1980. The next wettest, 3.34 inches, fell in 1993.
Leslie’s center stands about 820 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 610 ft to 930 ft, a difference of 320 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pennsylvanian Undifferentiated (shale, limestone, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 43×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, chert. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 Leslie reaches the Gulf of America by way of Little Creek, the Bourbeuse, the Meramec and the Mississippi: about 1,260 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Leslie; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Leslie has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 14 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 45 inches of water.
On November 14 Leslie normally reaches 56° and falls to 31°. The record high is 84°, in 1989; the record low 7°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 2.24 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1980 at Rosebud, 8 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.