The Fort Branch 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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6° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 7° in 1959.
Fort Branch’s center stands about 450 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 410 ft to 500 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Big Ditney Hill, about 680 ft, 14 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Patoka and Shelburn Formations (shale, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
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 24 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 Fort Branch reaches the Gulf of America by way of West Fork Pigeon Creek, Pigeon Creek, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,200 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 Fort Branch; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Fort Branch has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. A normal year brings about 12 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 50 inches of water.
On November 14 Fort Branch normally reaches 55° and falls to 34°. The record high is 80°, in 1931; the record low 9°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 4.29 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at 1 WSW Princeton, 7 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
