The Sand Fork 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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10° on Nov. 17, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1918. Next is 11° in 1986.
Sand Fork’s center stands about 760 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 740 ft to 1,300 ft, a difference of 560 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Fisher Knob, about 1,770 ft, 14 miles south-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Monongahela Group (sandstone, siltstone, shale), 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 23×. 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, 299 to 324 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 million years old. About 3 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 Sand Fork reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Sand Fork, the Little Kanawha, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,870 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 Sand Fork; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sand Fork has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 17 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 51 inches of water.
On November 14 Sand Fork normally reaches 57° and falls to 32°. The record high is 81°, in 1993; the record low 11°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.60 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1918 at Gassaway, 17 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
