The Shelby 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
Mostly sunny
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21° on Nov. 11, 2025, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1995. Next is 22° in 1997.
Shelby’s center stands about 500 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 430 ft to 630 ft, a difference of 200 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Cohabie Mountain, about 990 ft, 13 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Newala Limestone, from the Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old.
The section below crosses 13 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 32×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Metasiltstone, slate, quartzite. Age: Precambrian to Cambrian. About 7 mi of the line.
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 3 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Phyllite, metaclastic. Age: Silurian to Devonian, 359 to 445 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Quartzite, metaconglomerate. Age: Precambrian to Cambrian. 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. 7 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 Shelby reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Mill Creek, the Coosa, the Alabama and the Mobile: about 420 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 Shelby; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Shelby has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. About 56 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Shelby normally reaches 66° and falls to 43°. The record high is 79°, in 2005; the record low 26°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 1.71 in, fell in 1998.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1995 at Alabaster Shelby Co Airport Asos, 12 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
