The Gassaway 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
10° on Nov. 17, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1918. Next is 11° in 1986.
Gassaway’s center stands about 870 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 820 ft to 1,540 ft, a difference of 720 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Pilot Knob, about 2,300 ft, 13 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 16×. 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 12 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 7 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 0.7 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 Gassaway reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Elk River, the Kanawha, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,830 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 Gassaway; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Gassaway has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 17 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 51 inches of water.
On November 14 Gassaway normally reaches 57° and falls to 32°. The record high is 81°, in 1993; the record low 11°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.60 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1918 at Gassaway, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
