The Piketon 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.
82° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 80° in 1902.
Piketon’s center stands about 570 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 540 ft to 970 ft, a difference of 430 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Potts Hill, about 1,340 ft, 14 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ohio Shale (shale, black-shale), from the Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 26×. 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, sandstone. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, black-shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.1 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 Piketon reaches the Gulf of America by way of Big Beaver Creek, the Scioto, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,620 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 Piketon; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Piketon has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 12 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 44 inches of water.
On November 14 Piketon normally reaches 55° and falls to 32°. The record high is 80°, in 1909; the record low 8°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.31 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Waverly, 4 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.