The Rockford 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 1897. Next is 6° in 1959.
Rockford’s center stands about 820 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 790 ft to 860 ft, a difference of 70 ft: gently rolling country.
The section below crosses 4 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.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 425 to 445 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 428 to 445 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, dolostone, limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 0.5 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 Rockford reaches Lake Erie by way of the Saint Marys and the Maumee: about 190 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
140 miles of the trip are on the Maumee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Rockford; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Rockford has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 29 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 Rockford normally reaches 51° and falls to 34°. The record high is 71°, in 1956; the record low 12°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 2.49 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1897 at Celina 3 NE, 10 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
