The Salem 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.
Chance of showers
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77° on Nov. 13, 1949, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1931. Next is 77° in 2020.
Salem’s center stands about 1,000 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 980 ft to 1,400 ft, a difference of 420 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Wheeler Hill, about 1,410 ft, 3 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cuyahoga Group (siltstone, shale), from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 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 38×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 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 Salem reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Little Shenango, the Shenango, the Beaver, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 2,010 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Salem; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Salem has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. A normal year brings about 62 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 44 inches of water.
On November 14 Salem normally reaches 50° and falls to 32°. The record high is 70°, in 1989; the record low 13°, in 1933. The most rain on this date, 1.22 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1931 at Jamestown 2 NW, 8 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
