The Clarksburg 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.
11° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is 12° in 1920.
Clarksburg’s center stands about 770 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 680 ft to 880 ft, a difference of 200 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Sand Hill, about 1,330 ft, 15 miles southeast.
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 42×. 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, black-shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 19 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 428 to 445 million years old. About 0.3 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 Clarksburg reaches the Gulf of America by way of Plum Run, Hay Run, Deer Creek, the Scioto, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,690 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 Clarksburg; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Clarksburg has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. A normal year brings about 15 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 41 inches of water.
On November 14 Clarksburg normally reaches 55° and falls to 35°. The record high is 76°, in 1909; the record low 12°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.31 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 at Circleville, 13 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.