The Pearisburg 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
78° on Nov. 14, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1951. Next is 75° in 1985.
Pearisburg’s center stands about 1,800 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,550 ft to 3,650 ft, a difference of 2,100 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bald Knob, about 4,350 ft, 11 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Moccasin or Bays Formation through Blackford Formation (shale), from the Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 8×. 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: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, limestone, shale. Age: Silurian to Devonian, 359 to 445 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Cambrian to Ordovician, 445 to 542 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, black-shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Age: Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 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 Pearisburg reaches the Gulf of America by way of the New River, the Kanawha, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,880 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 Pearisburg; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Pearisburg has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. A normal year brings about 23 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 42 inches of water.
On November 14 Pearisburg normally reaches 56° and falls to 31°. The record high is 78°, in 1993; the record low 8°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.63 in, fell in 2008.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1951 at Pearisburg 4 SSE, 4 miles south-southeast, 120 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
