The Clay City 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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82° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1892. Next is 80° in 1958.
Clay City’s center stands about 630 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 610 ft to 1,210 ft, a difference of 600 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Grassy Knob, about 1,500 ft, 6 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (sand, silt), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 24×. 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. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 2 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 Clay City reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Red River, the Kentucky, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,610 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 Clay City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Clay City has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 9 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 48 inches of water.
On November 14 Clay City normally reaches 56° and falls to 32°. The record high is 76°, in 1927; the record low 8°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.17 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 at Mount Sterling, 14 miles north, 330 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
