The Grayson 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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13° on Nov. 14, 1986, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1891. Next is 13° in 2019.
Grayson’s center stands about 630 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 570 ft to 940 ft, a difference of 370 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Locust Knob, about 1,300 ft, 14 miles south-southwest.
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 37×. 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, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. 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 4 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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. 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 Grayson reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Little Sandy, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,650 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 Grayson; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Grayson has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. A normal year brings about 20 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 45 inches of water.
On November 14 Grayson normally reaches 57° and falls to 37°. The record high is 82°, in 1993; the record low 13°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.51 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1891 from the Huntington Area threaded record (Huntington Tri-State Airport, 21 miles east, 190 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
