The La Crosse 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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85° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 84° in 1993.
La Crosse’s center stands about 470 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 290 ft to 480 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Biotite-Muscovite Granite, from the Proterozoic, 542 to 2,500 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 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.
Biotite-gneiss. Age: Proterozoic, 542 to 2,500 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Proterozoic, 542 to 2,500 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Late Mississippian to Permian, 265 to 325 million years old. About 0.3 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 La Crosse reaches Albemarle Sound and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Taylors Creek, the Meherrin and the Chowan: about 170 river miles.
120 miles of the trip are on the Meherrin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of La Crosse; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
La Crosse has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 29° in January. About 44 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 La Crosse normally reaches 63° and falls to 39°. The record high is 78°, in 1964; the record low 20°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.64 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at John H Kerr Dam, 13 miles west-southwest, 220 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
