The Martinsburg 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; warmer
Sunny
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
1° on Nov. 17, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1911. Next is 7° in 2019.
Martinsburg’s center stands about 810 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 770 ft to 840 ft, a difference of 70 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Marmaton Group (limestone, shale), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million 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.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Dolostone, sandstone, limestone. Age: Early Ordovician to Middle Ordovician, 459 to 487 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Limestone, sandstone. Age: Early Devonian to Late Devonian, 359 to 422 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 Martinsburg reaches the Gulf of America by way of Little Loutre Creek, the Loutre, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,320 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Martinsburg; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Martinsburg has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. About 41 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Martinsburg normally reaches 53° and falls to 33°. The record high is 77°, in 1960; the record low 12°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.40 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1911 at Vandalia, 16 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
