Barometric Pressure Forecast for Pikeville, Kentucky
Barometric pressure forecast for Pikeville, Kentucky — on the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River in Pike County, in the eastern Kentucky coalfield. See current barometric pressure and what it means for weather-sensitive people.
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Pressure and weather in Pikeville
Pikeville lies at about 650 feet on a narrow floodplain in the deeply dissected Appalachian Plateau, hemmed in by ridges rising six hundred to a thousand feet directly above the town, so tightly that in the 1970s the city cut a channel through a mountain to move the river, the railroad and the highway out of its own way. Those ridges do two things. They trap cold air and fog on the valley floor, so inversions are the normal state on clear nights and morning fog is a near-daily fact from late summer into autumn, lifting only when the sun finally reaches the bottom. And they concentrate water: the Levisa Fork drains a steep narrow basin where runoff is fast, so a slow-moving summer thunderstorm or a stalled frontal band can turn creeks into flash floods within the hour, which remains the region's most persistent hazard. The largest pressure falls come in winter and early spring from lows tracking up the Ohio Valley or northeast out of the Gulf, usually twenty to twenty-eight hPa, and eastern Kentucky sits close enough to the mountains that one storm can deliver snow, sleet, freezing rain and rain in sequence across twelve hours. Cold air damming east of the ridges occasionally reaches this far west and holds the valley in freezing drizzle while it rains on the ridge tops above.
What this means for you
Valley inversions mean conditions on the floor and conditions on the ridge can diverge for days at a time. A barometric pressure forecast describes the system, while the fog and the cold in the valley keep their own timetable.