The Columbia 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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87° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1965. Next is 85° in 2011.
Columbia’s center stands about 220 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 90 ft to 270 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Claiborne Group; Gosport Sand and Lisbon Formation undifferentiated in part, from the Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 60×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Eocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 56 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 0.4 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 Columbia reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Chattahoochee and the Apalachicola: about 150 river miles.
110 miles of the trip are on the Apalachicola.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Columbia; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Columbia has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 40° in January. About 54 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Columbia normally reaches 72° and falls to 47°. The record high is 83°, in 2008; the record low 30°, in 1969. The most rain on this date, 0.69 in, fell in 2018.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1965 at Dothan Regional Airport, 20 miles west, 150 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
