The West Jefferson 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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4° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1918. Next is 5° in 1933.
West Jefferson’s center stands about 970 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 890 ft to 1,000 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Columbus Limestone, 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 55×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 428 to 445 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 0.7 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 West Jefferson reaches the Gulf of America by way of Little Darby Creek, Big Darby Creek, the Scioto, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,730 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 West Jefferson; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
West Jefferson has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. About 42 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 West Jefferson normally reaches 50° and falls to 32°. The record high is 72°, in 1971; the record low 4°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.72 in, fell in 1999.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1918 at London State Fish Hatchery, 11 miles west-southwest, 150 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
