The Lafferty 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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85° on Nov. 15, 1956, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1878. Next is 78° in 1958.
Lafferty’s center stands about 1,150 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 990 ft to 1,280 ft, a difference of 290 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Galloway Knob, about 1,370 ft, 8 miles south-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Monongahela Group (shale, siltstone, mudstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
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 43×. 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, siltstone, mudstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, mudstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Mudstone, shale, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 million years old. About 2 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 Lafferty reaches the Gulf of America by way of Wheeling Creek, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,880 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 Lafferty; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lafferty has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. About 38 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Lafferty normally reaches 52° and falls to 36°. The record high is 74°, in 1989; the record low 10°, in 1920. The most rain on this date, 1.10 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1878 from the Wheeling Area threaded record (Wheeling Ohio County Airport, 20 miles east). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
