The Piedmont 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
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
81° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1996. Next is 79° in 2011.
Piedmont’s center stands about 1,180 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 880 ft to 2,530 ft, a difference of 1,650 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Wild Turkey Rock, about 3,230 ft, 12 miles west-southwest.
The section below crosses 12 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 8×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Claystone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Devonian to Late Devonian, 374 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale, sandstone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 6 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Piedmont reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the North Branch Potomac and the Potomac: about 340 river miles.
290 miles of the trip are on the Potomac.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Piedmont; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Piedmont has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. A normal year brings about 34 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 41 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Keyser 2 SSW, 4 miles south-southeast, 220 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
