The Cottonwood 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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28° on Nov. 12, 2011, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1950. Next is 28° in 2019.
Cottonwood’s center stands about 180 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 130 ft to 230 ft, a difference of 100 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Claiborne/Jackson Group; Residuum (clay), from the Eocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 56 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 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.
Clay. Age: Eocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 56 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Late Eocene, 34 to 38 million years old. About 8 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 Cottonwood reaches the Gulf of America by way of Boggy Creek, Marshall Creek, the Chipola and the Apalachicola: about 130 river miles.
90 miles of the trip are on the Chipola.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cottonwood; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cottonwood has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 41° in January. About 51 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Cottonwood normally reaches 72° and falls to 47°. The record high is 85°, in 1955; the record low 29°, in 2013. The most rain on this date, 1.83 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1950 at Marianna Municipal Airport, 16 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
