The Ironville 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
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
6° on Nov. 14, 1986, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1896. Next is 7° in 1996.
Ironville’s center stands about 680 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 550 ft to 890 ft, a difference of 340 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is High Knob, about 1,020 ft, 7 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Breathitt Formation, upper part (sandstone, siltstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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.
Siltstone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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.
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 Ironville reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Daniels Fork, Hood Creek, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,630 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 Ironville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ironville has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. About 47 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Ironville normally reaches 54° and falls to 32°. The record high is 79°, in 1931; the record low 6°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.22 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1896 at Ashland, 5 miles east, 120 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
