The Megargel 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
Mostly cloudy
Sunny; warmer
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
7.86 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1940. The next wettest, 5.50 inches, fell in 2006.
Megargel’s center stands about 390 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 200 ft to 410 ft, a difference of 210 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Citronelle Formation (sand), from the Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 5.3 million years old.
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 48×. 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: Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 5.3 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Oligocene, 23 to 34 million years old. About 0.6 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 Megargel reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Lovetts Creek, the Alabama and the Mobile: about 120 river miles.
60 miles of the trip are on the Alabama.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Megargel; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Megargel has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 39° in January. About 64 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Megargel normally reaches 70° and falls to 47°. The record high is 84°, in 1985; the record low 24°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.15 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1940 at Atmore, 14 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
