The Emerald Mountain 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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86° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1872. Next is 85° in 1896.
Emerald Mountain’s center stands about 350 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 150 ft to 490 ft, a difference of 340 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bald Knob, about 580 ft, 8 miles northwest.
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 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 40×. 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. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Chalk, marl. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Mica-schist. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 2 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 Emerald Mountain reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of the Tallapoosa, the Alabama and the Mobile: about 380 river miles.
310 miles of the trip are on the Alabama.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Emerald Mountain; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Emerald Mountain has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. About 51 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Emerald Mountain normally reaches 70° and falls to 43°. The record high is 85°, in 1993; the record low 26°, in 2013. The most rain on this date, 3.25 in, fell in 1921.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1872 from the Montgomery Area threaded record (Montgomery Airport, 21 miles west-southwest, 130 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
