The Sistersville 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
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
80° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1927. Next is 79° in 1949.
Sistersville’s center stands about 650 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 600 ft to 1,150 ft, a difference of 550 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Owlshead, about 1,430 ft, 9 miles south-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 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 25×. 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 11 mi of the line.
Mudstone, shale, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, mudstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 1.0 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 Sistersville reaches the Gulf of America by way of Tanyard Run, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,810 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 Sistersville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sistersville 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 Sistersville 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 southeast, 130 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
