The Frankfort 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.
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
12° on Nov. 17, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1872. Next is 12° in 2019.
Frankfort’s center stands about 510 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 470 ft to 870 ft, a difference of 400 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Jeptha Knob, about 1,200 ft, 14 miles west.
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 42×. 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 14 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 0.5 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 Frankfort reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Kentucky, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,470 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 Frankfort; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Frankfort has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 25° in January. A normal year brings about 14 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 50 inches of water.
On November 14 Frankfort normally reaches 56° and falls to 37°. The record high is 77°, in 1971; the record low 15°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.52 in, fell in 1915.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1872 from the Lexington Area threaded record (Lexington Bluegrass Airport, 18 miles southeast, 450 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
