The Emelle 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
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
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92° on Nov. 13, 1985, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 85° in 2005.
Emelle’s center stands about 260 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 170 ft to 290 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Midway Group; Porters Creek Formation (clay, sand), from the Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 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.
Chalk. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Chalk, clay. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit 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 Emelle reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Little Sanusi Creek, Sanusi Creek, the Sucarnoochee, the Tombigbee and the Mobile: about 260 river miles.
160 miles of the trip are on the Tombigbee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Emelle; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Emelle has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 33° in January. About 55 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Emelle normally reaches 66° and falls to 40°. The record high is 81°, in 1964; the record low 22°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 3.35 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Gainesville Lock, 13 miles northeast, 140 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
