The Ragland 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; warmer
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82° on Nov. 15, 1955, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is 82° in 2005.
Ragland’s center stands about 550 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 460 ft to 840 ft, a difference of 380 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Chandler Mountain, about 1,500 ft, 15 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pottsville Formation (upper part) (shale, siltstone, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 11 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 28×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Cambrian to Ordovician, 445 to 542 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 5 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 Ragland reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Trout Creek, the Coosa, the Alabama and the Mobile: about 500 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lay Lake.
310 miles of the trip are on the Alabama.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Ragland; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ragland has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 33° in January. About 57 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Ragland normally reaches 65° and falls to 41°. The record high is 79°, in 1959; the record low 17°, in 1907. The most rain on this date, 2.25 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 at Oneonta, 20 miles northwest, 540 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
