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.
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11° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1878. Next is 12° in 1883.
Columbus’s center stands about 760 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 690 ft to 850 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 51×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Shale, black-shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 the Gulf of America by way of the Olentangy, the Scioto, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,720 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 Columbus; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Columbus has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 28 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 42 inches of water.
On November 14 Columbus normally reaches 53° and falls to 35°. The record high is 74°, in 1909; the record low 12°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.26 in, fell in 1897.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1878 from the Columbus Area threaded record (John Glenn International Airport, 7 miles east-northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
