The Cynthiana 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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80° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1917. Next is 78° in 2022.
Cynthiana’s center stands about 740 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 690 ft to 880 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Gallows Hill, about 1,000 ft, 15 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Lexington Limestone, from the Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 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 49×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 11 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.
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 Cynthiana reaches the Gulf of America by way of the South Fork Licking, the Licking, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,580 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 Cynthiana; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cynthiana has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. About 48 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Cynthiana normally reaches 56° and falls to 33°. The record high is 72°, in 1989; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.71 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1917 at Cynthiana, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
