The Vanleer 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.
82° on Nov. 11, 1927, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1900. Next is 82° in 1958.
Vanleer’s center stands about 840 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 610 ft to 870 ft, a difference of 260 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows St. Louis Limestone and Warsaw Limestone, from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 40×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 24 mi of the line.
Chert. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 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 Vanleer reaches the Gulf of America by way of Bear Creek, Yellow Creek, the Cumberland, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,160 river miles.
Lake on the way: Bards Lake.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Vanleer; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Vanleer has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. About 54 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Vanleer normally reaches 60° and falls to 37°. The record high is 79°, in 1994; the record low 16°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 4.00 in, fell in 1915.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1900 at Dickson, 12 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.