The Colony 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
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86° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1907. Next is 84° in 1911.
Colony’s center stands about 460 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 310 ft to 820 ft, a difference of 510 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Wornock Mountain, about 1,430 ft, 12 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pottsville Formation (lower part) (sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 24×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 0.4 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 0.3 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 Colony reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of the Mulberry Fork, the Black Warrior, the Tombigbee and the Mobile: about 460 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 Colony; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Colony has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 31° in January. About 60 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Colony normally reaches 64° and falls to 39°. The record high is 81°, in 1999; the record low 19°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 2.85 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1907 at Saint Bernard, 17 miles north-northeast, 320 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
