The Byron 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
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
82° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1935. Next is 81° in 2016.
Byron’s center stands about 1,680 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,570 ft to 1,680 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Greenhorn Limestone and Graneros Shale (shale, limestone), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 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.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.8 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 Byron reaches the Gulf of America by way of Otter Creek, the Republican, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,850 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 Byron; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Byron has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. A normal year brings about 15 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 31 inches of water.
On November 14 Byron normally reaches 53° and falls to 29°. The record high is 74°, in 2025; the record low 0°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.63 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1935 at Belleville, 14 miles south-southeast, 140 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
