The Belk 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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16° on Nov. 15, 1969, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1892. Next is 18° in 1953.
Belk’s center stands about 360 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 300 ft to 610 ft, a difference of 310 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Ford Mountain, about 820 ft, 14 miles northeast.
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 61×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand, clay. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 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 Belk reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Luxapallila Creek, the Tombigbee and the Mobile: about 380 river miles.
290 miles of the trip are on the Tombigbee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Belk; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Belk has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 34° in January. About 57 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Belk normally reaches 66° and falls to 41°. The record high is 83°, in 1978; the record low 21°, in 1982. The most rain on this date, 2.62 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 at Fayette, 6 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
