The Madison 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.
Chance of showers
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Mostly cloudy
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Sunny
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76° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1943. Next is 73° in 1949.
Madison’s center stands about 1,450 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 800 ft to 1,550 ft, a difference of 750 ft: hilly country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Allegheny Formation (sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 21×. 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. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 18 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 1 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 Madison reaches the Gulf of America by way of Mahoning Creek, the Allegheny, 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 Madison; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Madison has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. A normal year brings about 34 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 46 inches of water.
On November 14 Madison normally reaches 50° and falls to 31°. The record high is 72°, in 1955; the record low 9°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.05 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1943 at Putneyville 2 SE Dam, 9 miles east-southeast, 170 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
