The Opelika 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
Partly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
4.35 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1957. The next wettest, 3.90 inches, fell in 1986.
Opelika’s center stands about 810 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 680 ft to 870 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Opelika Complex; Auburn Gneiss, Unnamed unit (mica-schist), from the Precambrian to Paleozoic.
The section below crosses 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 42×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Gneiss, mylonite. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 7 mi of the line.
Monzogranite, leucocratic-granitic. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 5 mi of the line.
Biotite-gneiss, mica-schist. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 5 mi of the line.
Mica-schist. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 3 mi of the line.
Muscovite-schist, quartzite. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, clay, gravel. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 2 smaller units 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 Opelika reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Sougahatchee Creek, the Tallapoosa, the Alabama and the Mobile: about 470 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 Opelika; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Opelika has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 33° in January. About 55 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Opelika normally reaches 66° and falls to 40°. The record high is 79°, in 1958; the record low 21°, in 2013. The most rain on this date, 1.75 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1957 at Opelika, 4 miles west-northwest, 180 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
