The Fairbanks 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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Mostly sunny; warmer
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4° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1875. Next is 12° in 1911.
Fairbanks’s center stands about 550 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 440 ft to 590 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Yaw Hill, about 740 ft, 12 miles east-northeast.
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 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.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 307 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 307 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, limestone. Age: Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 307 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 Fairbanks reaches the Gulf of America by way of West Fork Turman Creek, Turman Creek, Big Bayou, the Wabash River Old Channel, the Old Channel Wabash, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,280 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 Fairbanks; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Fairbanks has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. About 41 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Fairbanks normally reaches 53° and falls to 34°. The record high is 77°, in 1931; the record low 14°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.10 in, fell in 2011.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1875 at Terre Haute Hulman Regional Airport, 19 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
