The Harrisburg 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.
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
7° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1994. Next is 13° in 2018.
Harrisburg’s center stands about 830 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 660 ft to 860 ft, a difference of 200 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cherokee Group - Cabaniss Subgroup, Krebs Subgroup (shale, sandstone, siltstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 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.
Shale, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 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 Harrisburg reaches the Gulf of America by way of Callahan Creek, Perche Creek, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,370 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Harrisburg; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Harrisburg has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 17 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 45 inches of water.
On November 14 Harrisburg normally reaches 55° and falls to 37°. The record high is 79°, in 2025; the record low 13°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.18 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1994 at Columbia U Of M, 16 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
