The Penn 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.
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74° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1905. Next is 70° in 2021.
Penn Hills’s center stands about 900 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 720 ft to 1,270 ft, a difference of 550 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Rich Hill, about 1,290 ft, 5 miles north.
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 3 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 14 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 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 Penn Hills reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Allegheny, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,960 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 Penn Hills; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Penn Hills has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. About 44 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1905 at Acmetonia Lock 3, 3 miles north-northeast, 150 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
