The Lucerne 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.
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
−5° on Nov. 13, 1986, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 3° in 2019.
Lucerne’s center stands about 970 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 880 ft to 1,050 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Marmaton Group (limestone, shale), 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 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, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian, 307 to 315 million years old. About 0.7 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 Lucerne reaches the Gulf of America by way of Medicine Creek, the Grand River, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,520 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 Lucerne; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lucerne has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. About 38 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Lucerne normally reaches 51° and falls to 30°. The record high is 79°, in 1897; the record low 5°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.93 in, fell in 1902.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Princeton, 16 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
