The Midway 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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12° on Nov. 17, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1872. Next is 12° in 2019.
Midway’s center stands about 840 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 770 ft to 910 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Catnip Hill, about 1,040 ft, 15 miles south-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Lexington Limestone, from the Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 38×. 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: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 23 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.7 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 Midway reaches the Gulf of America by way of South Elkhorn Creek, Elkhorn Creek, the Kentucky, 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 Midway; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Midway has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 25° in January. A normal year brings about 14 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 50 inches of water.
On November 14 Midway normally reaches 56° and falls to 37°. The record high is 77°, in 1971; the record low 15°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.52 in, fell in 1915.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1872 from the Lexington Area threaded record (Lexington Bluegrass Airport, 9 miles south-southeast, 120 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
