The The Plains 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.
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Sunny
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
79° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1896. Next is 75° in 2002.
The Plains’s center stands about 720 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 640 ft to 990 ft, a difference of 350 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Peck Hill, about 1,100 ft, 12 miles west-southwest.
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 44×. 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 19 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 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 The Plains reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Hocking, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,790 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 The Plains; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
The Plains has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. About 43 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1896 at Logan, 18 miles northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
