The Columbus 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.
77° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1895. Next is 73° in 1990.
Columbus’s center stands about 1,460 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,380 ft to 1,770 ft, a difference of 390 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Jackson Hill, about 1,980 ft, 8 miles south-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Venango Formation (siltstone, conglomerate), from the Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 29×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Siltstone, conglomerate. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 8 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 Columbus reaches the Gulf of America by way of Brokenstraw Creek, the Allegheny, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 2,160 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Ohio.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Columbus; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Columbus has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. A normal year brings about 98 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 46 inches of water.
On November 14 Columbus normally reaches 49° and falls to 31°. The record high is 71°, in 2010; the record low 7°, in 1905. The most rain on this date, 0.88 in, fell in 1988.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1895 from the Jamestown Area threaded record (Jamestown 4 ENE, 24 miles east-northeast, 210 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.