The Morehead 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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82° on Nov. 17, 1958, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1904. Next is 82° in 2020.
Morehead’s center stands about 730 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 700 ft to 1,270 ft, a difference of 570 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Gate Post Hill, about 1,400 ft, 15 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (sand, silt), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 31×. 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. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, dolostone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 0.2 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 Morehead reaches the Gulf of America by way of Triplett Creek, the Licking, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,660 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 Morehead; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Morehead has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 25° in January. A normal year brings about 12 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 51 inches of water.
On November 14 Morehead normally reaches 57° and falls to 35°. The record high is 81°, in 1909; the record low 10°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.44 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1904 at Cave Run Lake, 7 miles southwest, 110 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
