The Columbus 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.
Showers likely
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74° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1907. Next is 69° in 1999.
Columbus’s center stands about 1,330 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,110 ft to 1,890 ft, a difference of 780 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Briar Hill, about 2,070 ft, 14 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Moscow Formation (sandstone, shale), from the Middle Devonian, 384 to 388 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 20×. 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, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 388 million years old. About 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 Columbus reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Center Brook, the Unadilla and the Susquehanna: about 440 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Aldred.
360 miles of the trip are on the Susquehanna.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Columbus; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Columbus has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about 12° in January. A normal year brings about 77 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 42 inches of water.
On November 14 Columbus normally reaches 47° and falls to 29°. The record high is 65°, in 2010; the record low 7°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.85 in, fell in 1916.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1907 at Sherburne, 7 miles west, 240 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
