The Memphis 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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12° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1934. Next is 18° in 1963.
Memphis’s center stands about 190 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 110 ft to 220 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvial, coastal and low terrace deposits (sand), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 years old.
The section below crosses 4 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: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
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 6 mi of the line.
Chalk, clay. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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 Memphis reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of the Tombigbee and the Mobile: about 310 river miles.
260 miles of the trip are on the Tombigbee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Memphis; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Memphis has a cold desert climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 33° in January. Barely 0.0 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Memphis normally reaches 66° and falls to 42°. The record high is 81°, in 1985; the record low 22°, in 1963. The most rain on this date, 2.20 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1934 at Aliceville, 9 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
