The South 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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5° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1915. Next is 8° in 1933.
South Salem’s center stands about 920 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 850 ft to 1,230 ft, a difference of 380 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Brown Hill, about 1,350 ft, 14 miles south-southwest.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 31×. 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, black-shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 428 to 445 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 425 to 434 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 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 South Salem reaches the Gulf of America by way of Buckskin Creek, Paint Creek, the Scioto, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,690 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 South Salem; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
South Salem has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. A normal year brings about 18 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 41 inches of water.
On November 14 South Salem normally reaches 52° and falls to 32°. The record high is 75°, in 1931; the record low 5°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.50 in, fell in 1929.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1915 at Washington Court House, 15 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
