The West Union 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.
73° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 73° in 2012.
West Union’s center stands about 1,160 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,080 ft to 1,230 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 44×. 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, dolostone. Age: Middle Devonian to Late Devonian, 374 to 388 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Shale, dolostone. Age: Late Ordovician, 447 to 454 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Silurian, 440 to 445 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 447 to 459 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Late Ordovician to Silurian, 434 to 447 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 West Union reaches the Gulf of America by way of Otter Creek, the Turkey and the Mississippi: about 1,660 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of West Union; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
West Union has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 6° in January. A normal year brings about 41 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 West Union normally reaches 45° and falls to 25°. The record high is 73°, in 1999; the record low −3°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.68 in, fell in 1927.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Fayette, 5 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.