The Buford 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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7° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 9° in 1894.
Buford’s center stands about 960 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 930 ft to 1,010 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Calebs Hill, about 1,160 ft, 8 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Waynesville and Arnheim Formations, Undivided (shale, limestone), from the Late Ordovician, 445 to 454 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.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 454 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone, dolostone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 454 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 425 to 434 million years old. About 2 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 Buford reaches the Gulf of America by way of Ruble Run, North Fork White Oak Creek, White Oak Creek, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,560 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Buford; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Buford has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 18 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 47 inches of water.
On November 14 Buford normally reaches 54° and falls to 32°. The record high is 75°, in 1909; the record low 7°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.76 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Hillsboro, 17 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
