The Rockford 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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18° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1969. Next is 20° in 1969.
Rockford’s center stands about 740 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 530 ft to 850 ft, a difference of 320 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Locust Mountain, about 1,270 ft, 12 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Rockford Granite (leucocratic-granitic), from the Precambrian to Paleozoic.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 29×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Orthogneiss. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 8 mi of the line.
Leucocratic-granitic. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 4 mi of the line.
Quartzite, schist. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 4 mi of the line.
Biotite-gneiss. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 4 mi of the line.
Mica-schist, phyllite. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 2 mi of the line.
Mica-schist. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. 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. 1 smaller unit 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 Rockford reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Davidson Creek, Hatchet Creek, the Coosa, the Alabama and the Mobile: about 430 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 Rockford; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Rockford has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 32° in January. About 57 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Rockford normally reaches 67° and falls to 40°. The record high is 79°, in 1989; the record low 23°, in 2013. The most rain on this date, 1.76 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1969 at Alexander City, 16 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
