The Donora 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
Chance of showers
Mostly cloudy
Sunny
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
13° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1935. Next is 17° in 2017.
Donora’s center stands about 970 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 730 ft to 1,250 ft, a difference of 520 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Fort Hill, about 1,590 ft, 11 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Monongahela Group (limestone, shale, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 25×. 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 17 mi of the line.
Shale, clastic. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.4 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 Donora reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Monongahela, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,980 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 Donora; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Donora has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. About 41 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Donora normally reaches 52° and falls to 36°. The record high is 70°, in 2011; the record low 18°, in 1942. The most rain on this date, 0.54 in, fell in 2011.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1935 at Pittsburgh Allegheny County Airport, 13 miles north-northwest, 270 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
