The Flatwoods 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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12° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1917. Next is 14° in 1991.
Flatwoods’s center stands about 1,220 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 920 ft to 1,610 ft, a difference of 690 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Elk Mountain, about 2,470 ft, 15 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Conemaugh Group (shale, siltstone, 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 13×. 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 10 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 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 Flatwoods reaches the Gulf of America by way of Saltlick Creek, the Little Kanawha, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,900 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 Flatwoods; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Flatwoods 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 Flatwoods 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, 5 miles south-southwest, 350 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
