The Sunbury 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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10° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1896. Next is 13° in 1957.
Sunbury’s center stands about 970 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 890 ft to 1,100 ft, a difference of 210 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Hulse Hill, about 1,410 ft, 13 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Berea Sandstone and Bedford Shale, Undivided (sandstone, 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 35×. 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.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 4 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 Sunbury reaches the Gulf of America by way of Little Walnut Creek, Big Walnut Creek, the Scioto, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,750 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 Sunbury; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sunbury 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 19 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 42 inches of water.
On November 14 Sunbury normally reaches 54° and falls to 35°. The record high is 70°, in 2011; the record low 13°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.60 in, fell in 1897.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1896 at Westerville, 9 miles south-southwest, 170 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
