The Franklin 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
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
77° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1985. Next is 75° in 2022.
Franklin’s center stands about 950 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 850 ft to 1,070 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Prospect Hill, about 1,230 ft, 9 miles west.
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 44×. 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: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 21 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 0.5 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 Franklin reaches Lake Erie by way of Evans Creek and the River Raisin: about 100 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Franklin; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Franklin has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. About 36 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1985 at Tecumseh, 8 miles east-southeast, 170 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
