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.
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy; warmer
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.
Madison’s center stands about 1,170 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 910 ft to 1,330 ft, a difference of 420 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Ore Mine Hill, about 1,740 ft, 14 miles 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 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.
Limestone, shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Shale, clastic. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.3 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 Madison reaches the Gulf of America by way of Sewickley Creek, the Youghiogheny, the Monongahela, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,990 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 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 Madison 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, 15 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
