The Harpster 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.
78° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 74° in 1893.
Harpster’s center stands about 910 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 850 ft to 960 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Tymochtee and Greenfield Formations, Undivided (dolostone), from the Silurian, 428 to 445 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 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.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 428 to 445 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 4 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 Harpster reaches Lake Erie by way of the Little Sandusky and the Sandusky: about 90 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Harpster; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Harpster has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. A normal year brings about 23 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 38 inches of water.
On November 14 Harpster normally reaches 52° and falls to 35°. The record high is 72°, in 1909; the record low 6°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.15 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Bucyrus, 16 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.