The Parkersburg 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
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
81° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1982. Next is 78° in 1993.
Parkersburg’s center stands about 620 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 580 ft to 890 ft, a difference of 310 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Buzzard Rocks, about 1,090 ft, 12 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Quaternary Alluvium (fine-detrital, coarse-detrital), from the Quaternary, less than 2.6 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 40×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Mudstone, shale, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 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 Parkersburg reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Little Kanawha, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,760 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 Parkersburg; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Parkersburg has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. A normal year brings about 11 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 44 inches of water.
On November 14 Parkersburg normally reaches 56° and falls to 36°. The record high is 77°, in 1989; the record low 10°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.87 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1982 at Parkersburg, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
