The Clayton 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.
5° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 9° in 1959.
Clayton’s center stands about 1,010 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 920 ft to 1,050 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
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 57×. 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, dolostone, limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 425 to 445 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone, shale. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 454 million years old. About 0.8 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 Clayton reaches the Gulf of America by way of Moss Creek, Wolf Creek, the Great Miami, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,550 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 Clayton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Clayton has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 25 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 41 inches of water.
On November 14 Clayton normally reaches 53° and falls to 36°. The record high is 76°, in 1909; the record low 11°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.44 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the Dayton Area threaded record (Dayton International Airport, 8 miles east-northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.