The Melbourne 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.
3.00 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1948. The next wettest, 2.74 inches, fell in 2005.
Melbourne’s center stands about 510 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 460 ft to 850 ft, a difference of 390 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Visalia Hill, about 900 ft, 10 miles south-southwest.
The section below crosses 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 41×. 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, shale. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Middle Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 445 to 471 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. 2 smaller units 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 Melbourne reaches the Gulf of America by way of 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 Melbourne; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Melbourne has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. About 43 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Melbourne normally reaches 56° and falls to 34°. The record high is 77°, in 1971; the record low 14°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.35 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Cincinnati Municipal Airport Lunken Field, 6 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.