The Reader 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.
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80° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1927. Next is 79° in 1949.
Reader’s center stands about 690 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 680 ft to 1,380 ft, a difference of 700 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Owlshead, about 1,480 ft, 5 miles east-southeast.
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.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 20×. 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 24 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 Reader reaches the Gulf of America by way of Fishing Creek, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,840 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 Reader; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Reader 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 Reader 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, 10 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
