The Matheny 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.
Partly cloudy
Cloudy
Partly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
13° on Nov. 14, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is 14° in 2014.
Matheny’s center stands about 1,360 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,310 ft to 2,510 ft, a difference of 1,200 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Ivy Knob, about 3,540 ft, 10 miles northeast.
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 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 9×. 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 14 mi of the line.
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 0.4 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 Matheny reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Laurel Fork, the Clear Fork, the Guyandotte, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,780 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 Matheny; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Matheny has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. About 49 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Matheny normally reaches 57° and falls to 31°. The record high is 81°, in 1993; the record low 13°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.75 in, fell in 2008.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1940 at Mullens 3 E, 16 miles east-southeast, 200 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
