The Orchard Hills 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; warmer
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
77° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1953. Next is 74° in 1993.
Orchard Hills’s center stands about 1,160 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 790 ft to 1,470 ft, a difference of 680 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Watts Hill, about 1,610 ft, 13 miles east.
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 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 26×. 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. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Shale, clastic. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone. 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 Orchard Hills reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Kiskiminetas, the Allegheny, 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 Orchard Hills; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Orchard Hills has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. A normal year brings about 29 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 46 inches of water.
On November 14 Orchard Hills normally reaches 52° and falls to 33°. The record high is 70°, in 1989; the record low 9°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.80 in, fell in 1985.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1953 at Salina 3 W, 5 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
