The Belle Fontaine 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
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
28° on Nov. 11, 2025, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 30° in 1963.
Belle Fontaine’s center stands about 40 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 70 ft, a difference of 70 ft: gently rolling country. Open water lies within three miles.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvial, coastal and low terrace deposits (sand), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 years old.
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 64×. 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. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 5.3 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 0.5 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.
Rain that falls on Belle Fontaine runs straight into Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Belle Fontaine; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Belle Fontaine has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 42° in January. About 60 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Belle Fontaine normally reaches 72° and falls to 50°. The record high is 81°, in 2024; the record low 32°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 1.40 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Mobile Downtown Airport, 9 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
