The West Point 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.
5° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1944. Next is 9° in 1986.
West Point’s center stands about 670 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 510 ft to 750 ft, a difference of 240 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Borden Group (siltstone), from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 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 58×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 8 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 Point reaches the Gulf of America by way of Flint Creek, Big Bayou, the Wabash River Old Channel, the Old Channel Wabash, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,390 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 West Point; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
West Point has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. About 37 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 West Point normally reaches 51° and falls to 33°. The record high is 75°, in 1971; the record low 9°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.31 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1944 at Lafayette Purdue University Airport, 7 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.