The Fort Knox 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 sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
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Sunny
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Mostly sunny
13° on Nov. 17, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1872. Next is 15° in 1986.
Fort Knox’s center stands about 720 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 520 ft to 790 ft, a difference of 270 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Blueball Hill, about 1,030 ft, 11 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ste. Genevieve and St. Louis Limestones, undivided, from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 35×. 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: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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.
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 Fort Knox reaches the Gulf of America by way of Dry Branch, Otter Creek, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,320 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 Fort Knox; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Fort Knox has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. A normal year brings about 13 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 48 inches of water.
On November 14 Fort Knox normally reaches 58° and falls to 40°. The record high is 79°, in 1902; the record low 15°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.44 in, fell in 1929.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1872 from the Louisville Area threaded record (Louisville International Airport, 24 miles north-northeast, 240 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
