The Independence 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 cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
10° on Nov. 17, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1871. Next is 10° in 2019.
Independence’s center stands about 890 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 640 ft to 940 ft, a difference of 300 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Bull Fork Formation (limestone), from the Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 39×. 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: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Middle Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 445 to 471 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 0.6 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 Independence reaches the Gulf of America by way of Banklick Creek, the Licking, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,490 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 Independence; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Independence has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. A normal year brings about 23 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 45 inches of water.
On November 14 Independence normally reaches 54° and falls to 35°. The record high is 76°, in 1931; the record low 12°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.71 in, fell in 1871.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1871 from the Cincinnati Area threaded record (Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, 10 miles northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
