The Mason 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. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1923. Next is 75° in 1971.
Mason’s center stands about 810 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 670 ft to 920 ft, a difference of 250 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Grant Lake and Fairview Formations, Miamitown Shale, Undivided (shale, limestone), from the Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 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 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, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 454 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Middle Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 445 to 471 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 454 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 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 Mason reaches the Gulf of America by way of Muddy Creek, the Little Miami, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,520 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 Mason; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mason has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. About 42 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Mason normally reaches 54° and falls to 32°. The record high is 72°, in 2011; the record low 10°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.53 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1923 at Franklin, 13 miles north, 130 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
