The Despard 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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82° on Nov. 17, 1958, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1922. Next is 79° in 1993.
Despard’s center stands about 1,080 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 950 ft to 1,480 ft, a difference of 530 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is King Knob, about 1,970 ft, 13 miles 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 28×. 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, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 million years old. About 1 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 Despard reaches the Gulf of America by way of Elk Creek, the West Fork, the Monongahela, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 2,110 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Ohio.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Despard; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Despard has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. About 45 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Despard normally reaches 56° and falls to 36°. The record high is 77°, in 1955; the record low 12°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.43 in, fell in 2007.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1922 from the Clarksburg Area threaded record (Clarksburg Benedum Airport, 4 miles east-northeast, 120 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
