The Knoxville 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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11° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1993. Next is 12° in 1995.
Knoxville’s center stands about 1,290 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,190 ft to 2,160 ft, a difference of 970 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Big Level, about 2,570 ft, 13 miles west-southwest.
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 15×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, mudstone. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 3 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 Knoxville reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Cowanesque, the Tioga, the Chemung and the Susquehanna: about 370 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Aldred.
250 miles of the trip are on the Susquehanna.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Knoxville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Knoxville has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. A normal year brings about 38 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 37 inches of water.
On November 14 Knoxville normally reaches 48° and falls to 30°. The record high is 74°, in 1999; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.67 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1993 at Cowanesque Dam, 15 miles east, 140 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
