The Bessemer 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; warmer
Mostly sunny
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Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
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20° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1977. Next is 21° in 1997.
Bessemer’s center stands about 520 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 440 ft to 810 ft, a difference of 370 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Johnson Mountain, about 860 ft, 13 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Conasauga Formation (limestone, shale), from the Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old.
The section below crosses 10 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 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 4 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 Bessemer reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Valley Creek, the Black Warrior, the Tombigbee and the Mobile: about 430 river miles.
170 miles of the trip are on the Tombigbee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bessemer; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bessemer has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 34° in January. About 56 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Bessemer normally reaches 66° and falls to 42°. The record high is 81°, in 1993; the record low 23°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 2.09 in, fell in 1998.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1977 at Bessemer 3 WSW, 3 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
