The Cottondale 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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Partly cloudy; warmer
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21° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1994. Next is 23° in 1997.
Cottondale’s center stands about 340 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 210 ft to 460 ft, a difference of 250 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Martha Washington Mountain, about 680 ft, 15 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows High terrace deposits (sand), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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 35×. 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 8 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 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.
A raindrop that lands in Cottondale reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Cottondale Creek, Hurricane Creek, the Black Warrior, the Tombigbee and the Mobile: about 360 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 Cottondale; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cottondale has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. About 58 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Cottondale normally reaches 68° and falls to 44°. The record high is 80°, in 1999; the record low 26°, in 2013. The most rain on this date, 2.40 in, fell in 1998.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1994 at Tuscaloosa Acfd, 9 miles west-northwest, 180 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
