The Bartow 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.
74° on Nov. 11, 2006, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1944. Next is 71° in 1993.
Bartow’s center stands about 2,770 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,740 ft to 3,790 ft, a difference of 1,050 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bald Knob, about 4,860 ft, 10 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Chemung Group (siltstone, sandstone), from the Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old.
The section below crosses 13 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 9×. 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, sandstone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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. 7 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Bartow reaches the Gulf of America by way of the East Fork Greenbrier, the Greenbrier, the New River, the Kanawha, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 2,000 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 Bartow; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bartow has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 78° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. A normal year brings about 67 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 44 inches of water.
On November 14 Bartow normally reaches 49° and falls to 28°. The record high is 71°, in 1994; the record low 5°, in 1976. The most rain on this date, 1.70 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1944 at Bartow 1 S, here, 260 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.