The McKees Rocks 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
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
78° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1991. Next is 73° in 2014.
McKees Rocks’s center stands about 870 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 700 ft to 1,200 ft, a difference of 500 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Rich Hill, about 1,290 ft, 14 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Glenshaw Formation (shale), 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 30×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, clastic. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 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 McKees Rocks reaches the Gulf of America by way of Chartiers Creek, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,950 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 McKees Rocks; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
McKees Rocks has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. About 38 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 McKees Rocks normally reaches 54° and falls to 33°. The record high is 70°, in 1994; the record low 16°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.10 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1991 at Emsworth L/D Ohio River, 3 miles north-northwest, 150 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
