The Luray 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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11° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1962. Next is 19° in 1982.
Luray’s center stands about 420 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 390 ft to 530 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Sand Mountain, about 740 ft, 11 miles south-southeast.
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 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 1.0 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 Luray reaches the Gulf of America by way of the North Fork Forked Deer, the South Fork Forked Deer, the Forked Deer, the Obion and the Mississippi: about 930 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Luray; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Luray has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. About 55 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Luray normally reaches 61° and falls to 37°. The record high is 79°, in 1978; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.70 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1962 at Lexington, 11 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
