The Combs 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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14° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1961. Next is 17° in 2014.
Combs’s center stands about 960 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 850 ft to 1,530 ft, a difference of 680 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Dixon Knob, about 2,140 ft, 12 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Breathitt Formation, lower part (shale, siltstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 19×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 Combs reaches the Gulf of America by way of the North Fork Kentucky, the Kentucky, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,750 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 Combs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Combs has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. About 52 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Combs normally reaches 59° and falls to 34°. The record high is 84°, in 1994; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.59 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1961 at Buckhorn Lake, 15 miles west-northwest, 180 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
