The Clifton 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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78° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 73° in 1971.
Clifton’s center stands about 1,000 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 900 ft to 1,090 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is The Knobs, about 1,270 ft, 15 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cedarville, Springfield, and Euphemia Dolomites, Undivided (dolostone), from the Silurian, 422 to 434 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 61×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 434 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 428 to 445 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, dolostone, limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 454 million years old. About 0.1 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 Clifton reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Little Miami, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,570 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 Clifton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Clifton has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. About 40 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Clifton normally reaches 52° and falls to 32°. The record high is 71°, in 1989; the record low 4°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.25 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Springfield Water Treatment Plant, 12 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
