The Lyons 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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75° on Nov. 11, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1945. Next is 71° in 1964.
Lyons’s center stands about 810 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 770 ft to 970 ft, a difference of 200 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Gander Mountain, about 960 ft, 14 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Silurian, undivided (dolostone), from the Silurian, 422 to 445 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 54×. 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 19 mi of the line.
Shale, dolostone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 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 Lyons reaches the Gulf of America by way of the White River, the Fox River, the Illinois and the Mississippi: about 1,580 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Peoria Lake and Fox Lake.
1,190 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lyons; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lyons has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. A normal year brings about 40 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 37 inches of water.
On November 14 Lyons normally reaches 48° and falls to 31°. The record high is 70°, in 1971; the record low 8°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.13 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1945 at Lake Geneva Wwtp, 5 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
