The Harlan 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
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Mostly sunny
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80° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1931. Next is 78° in 1993.
Harlan’s center stands about 1,450 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,160 ft to 2,760 ft, a difference of 1,600 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is White Rocks, about 3,360 ft, 14 miles south-southwest.
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 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 10×. 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 15 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Conglomerate. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 299 to 422 million years old. About 0.9 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 Harlan reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Clover Fork Cumberland, the Cumberland, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,720 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Bards Lake, Lake Cumberland and Cordell Hull Reservoir.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Harlan; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Harlan has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. A normal year brings about 9 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 50 inches of water.
On November 14 Harlan normally reaches 59° and falls to 32°. The record high is 77°, in 1931; the record low 11°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.05 in, fell in 1989.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1931 at Pennington Gap, 18 miles east-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
