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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10° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1946. Next is 14° in 1950.
Lafayette’s center stands about 970 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 680 ft to 1,020 ft, a difference of 340 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Fort Payne Formation and Chattanooga Shale (chert), from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 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 34×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Chert. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Limestone, calcarenite. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 1 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 Town Creek, White Oak Creek, Salt Lick Creek, the Barren, the Green River, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,450 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 humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. A normal year brings about 8 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 54 inches of water.
On November 14 Lafayette normally reaches 59° and falls to 37°. The record high is 77°, in 1964; the record low 12°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.90 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1946 at Scottsville, 19 miles northwest, 230 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
