The Burnsville 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.
Cloudy
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
12° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1917. Next is 14° in 1991.
Burnsville’s center stands about 910 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 760 ft to 1,470 ft, a difference of 710 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Beverage Knob, about 1,940 ft, 15 miles east.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 21×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 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 Burnsville reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Little 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 Burnsville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Burnsville has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. About 52 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Burnsville normally reaches 58° and falls to 33°. The record high is 80°, in 1989; the record low 12°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.33 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1917 at Sutton Lake, 14 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
