The Smithers 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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84° on Nov. 15, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1934. Next is 80° in 1945.
Smithers’s center stands about 650 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 610 ft to 1,870 ft, a difference of 1,260 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Payne Knob, about 2,800 ft, 12 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Kanawha Formation (sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 10×. 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. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 1.0 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.4 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 Smithers reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Kanawha, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,770 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 Smithers; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Smithers has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. About 46 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Smithers normally reaches 57° and falls to 36°. The record high is 79°, in 1989; the record low 18°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.80 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1934 at London Locks, 4 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
