The Middlebourne 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.
80° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1927. Next is 79° in 1949.
Middlebourne’s center stands about 710 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 670 ft to 1,150 ft, a difference of 480 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Owlshead, about 1,480 ft, 15 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Dunkard Group (sandstone, siltstone, shale), from the Carboniferous to Permian, 252 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 22×. 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, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 million years old. About 21 mi of the line.
Mudstone, shale, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, mudstone. 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 Middlebourne reaches the Gulf of America by way of Middle Island Creek, 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 Middlebourne; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Middlebourne has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 27 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 47 inches of water.
On November 14 Middlebourne normally reaches 54° and falls to 30°. The record high is 76°, in 1955; the record low 10°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.93 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1927 at Middlebourne 3 ESE, 3 miles east-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.