The Lafayette 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.
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4° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1918. Next is 5° in 1933.
Lafayette’s center stands about 1,010 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 980 ft to 1,060 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is The Knobs, about 1,270 ft, 14 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Tymochtee and Greenfield Formations, Undivided (dolostone), from the Silurian, 428 to 445 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 45×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 428 to 445 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone, shale. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 425 to 445 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale, dolostone, limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 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 Lafayette reaches the Gulf of America by way of Deer Creek, the Scioto, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,730 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lafayette; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lafayette has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. About 42 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Lafayette normally reaches 50° and falls to 32°. The record high is 72°, in 1971; the record low 4°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.72 in, fell in 1999.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1918 at London State Fish Hatchery, 6 miles west-southwest, 110 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
