The Dawson 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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79° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1976. Next is 76° in 2005.
Dawson’s center stands about 860 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 840 ft to 1,380 ft, a difference of 540 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Fulton Knob, about 2,650 ft, 12 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Casselman Formation (shale, clastic), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 12×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone, shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Shale, clastic. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 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. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 Dawson reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Youghiogheny, the Monongahela, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 2,000 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 Dawson; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Dawson has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. A normal year brings about 24 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 47 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1976 at Connellsville 2 SSW, 5 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
