The Dawson 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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81° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1996. Next is 79° in 2011.
Dawson’s center stands about 800 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 720 ft to 2,630 ft, a difference of 1,910 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Black Rock, about 3,160 ft, 13 miles southwest.
The section below crosses 15 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 9×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Claystone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Siltstone, sandstone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Devonian to Late Devonian, 374 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 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. 9 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 Dawson reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the North Branch Potomac and the Potomac: about 330 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Dawson; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Dawson has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. A normal year brings about 34 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 41 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Keyser 2 SSW, 5 miles southwest, 160 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
