The Harrisonburg 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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21° on Nov. 14, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1972. Next is 27° in 1991.
Harrisonburg’s center stands about 80 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 30 ft to 220 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bald Hill, about 340 ft, 12 miles west-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Natural Levees (silt, clay), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 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 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Silt, clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, sand, silt. Age: Oligocene, 23 to 34 million years old. About 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 Harrisonburg reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Ouachita, the Black River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 220 river miles.
100 miles of the trip are on the Atchafalaya.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Harrisonburg; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Harrisonburg has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in August; winter nights fall to about 37° in January. About 60 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Harrisonburg normally reaches 67° and falls to 45°. The record high is 85°, in 2003; the record low 21°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 3.22 in, fell in 1998.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1972 at Jonesville Locks, 20 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
