The Pittsburgh 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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78° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1991. Next is 73° in 2014.
Pittsburgh’s center stands about 810 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 700 ft to 1,210 ft, a difference of 510 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Pollocks Knob, about 1,340 ft, 13 miles south.
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 32×. 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 9 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Shale, clastic. 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 3 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 Pittsburgh reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Monongahela, 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 Pittsburgh; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Pittsburgh 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 Pittsburgh 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, 7 miles northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
