The Eccles 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.
Mostly cloudy
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Partly cloudy
Sunny; warmer
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
79° on Nov. 16, 1918, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 79° in 1958.
Eccles’s center stands about 2,170 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,980 ft to 2,540 ft, a difference of 560 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Ivy Knob, about 3,540 ft, 12 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows New River Formation (sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
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 12×. 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. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 19 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.9 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 Eccles reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Marsh Fork, the Big Coal, the Coal, the Kanawha, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,820 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 Eccles; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Eccles has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. A normal year brings about 56 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 44 inches of water.
On November 14 Eccles normally reaches 54° and falls to 35°. The record high is 78°, in 1993; the record low 8°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.25 in, fell in 1915.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the Beckley Area threaded record (Beckley Raleigh County Airport, 8 miles east, 320 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
