The Epes 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.
92° on Nov. 13, 1985, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 85° in 2005.
Epes’s center stands about 170 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 70 ft to 270 ft, a difference of 200 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Armstrong Hill, about 380 ft, 13 miles south-southeast.
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 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.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Chalk. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand, clay, sandstone. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Chalk, 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.
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 Epes reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Wiggins Creek, Jones Creek, the Tombigbee and the Mobile: about 260 river miles.
200 miles of the trip are on the Tombigbee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Epes; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Epes 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 Epes 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, 10 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.