The Prestonsburg 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
14° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1911. Next is 16° in 1986.
Prestonsburg’s center stands about 640 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 620 ft to 1,330 ft, a difference of 710 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Rough Knob, about 1,740 ft, 15 miles south-southeast.
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 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 21×. 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, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.4 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 Prestonsburg reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Levisa Fork, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,710 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 Prestonsburg; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Prestonsburg has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. About 46 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Prestonsburg normally reaches 59° and falls to 32°. The record high is 84°, in 1993; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.44 in, fell in 2007.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1911 at Paintsville 1 E, 11 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
