The Ripplemead 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
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny; warmer
Sunny
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.
Ripplemead’s center stands about 1,850 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,570 ft to 2,770 ft, a difference of 1,200 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bald Knob, about 4,350 ft, 9 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Knox Group (dolostone, limestone), from the Cambrian to Ordovician, 445 to 542 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 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, limestone, shale. Age: Silurian to Devonian, 359 to 445 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Cambrian to Ordovician, 445 to 542 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.
Shale, black-shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 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 Ripplemead reaches the Gulf of America by way of the New River, the Kanawha, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,890 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 Ripplemead; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ripplemead 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 Ripplemead 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, 170 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
