The Lower Salem 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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79° on Nov. 17, 1958, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1926. Next is 79° in 1993.
Lower Salem’s center stands about 730 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 640 ft to 1,080 ft, a difference of 440 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is English Hill, about 1,170 ft, 14 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Conemaugh 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 33×. 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 12 mi of the line.
Mudstone, shale, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, mudstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 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 Lower Salem reaches the Gulf of America by way of East Fork Duck Creek, Duck Creek, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,800 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 Lower Salem; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lower Salem has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. About 42 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Lower Salem normally reaches 55° and falls to 35°. The record high is 79°, in 1993; the record low 11°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.25 in, fell in 2007.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1926 from the Parkersburg Area threaded record (Parkersburg/Mid-Ohio Valley Regional Airport, 16 miles south). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
