The Alabaster 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.
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
21° on Nov. 11, 2025, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1995. Next is 22° in 1997.
Alabaster’s center stands about 500 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 430 ft to 870 ft, a difference of 440 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Columbiana Mountain, about 990 ft, 14 miles east-southeast.
The section below crosses 9 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 27×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Cambrian to Ordovician, 445 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 3 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Alabaster reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Buck Creek, the Cahaba, the Alabama and the Mobile: about 390 river miles.
200 miles of the trip are on the Alabama.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Alabaster; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Alabaster has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. About 56 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Alabaster normally reaches 66° and falls to 43°. The record high is 79°, in 2005; the record low 26°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 1.71 in, fell in 1998.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1995 at Alabaster Shelby Co Airport Asos, 5 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
