The Bellefonte 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.
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
6° on Nov. 14, 1986, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1896. Next is 7° in 1996.
Bellefonte’s center stands about 660 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 510 ft to 840 ft, a difference of 330 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is High Knob, about 1,020 ft, 9 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Breathitt Formation, middle part (sandstone, shale), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 40×. 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, siltstone, mudstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 Bellefonte reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,620 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 Bellefonte; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bellefonte has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. About 47 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Bellefonte normally reaches 54° and falls to 32°. The record high is 79°, in 1931; the record low 6°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.22 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1896 at Ashland, 5 miles southeast, 100 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
