The Laura 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° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 9° in 1959.
Laura’s center stands about 1,000 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 930 ft to 1,040 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cincinnati Group as used by Wickstrom (1990) (shale, dolostone, limestone), from the Ordovician, 445 to 487 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 59×. 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, 425 to 445 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone, shale. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Shale, dolostone, limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 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 Laura reaches the Gulf of America by way of Ludlow Creek, the Stillwater, the Great Miami, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,560 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 Laura; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Laura has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 25 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 41 inches of water.
On November 14 Laura normally reaches 53° and falls to 36°. The record high is 76°, in 1909; the record low 11°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.44 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the Dayton Area threaded record (Dayton International Airport, 12 miles east-southeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.