The Sylvan Springs 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
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
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20° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1977. Next is 21° in 1997.
Sylvan Springs’s center stands about 670 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 410 ft to 740 ft, a difference of 330 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Little Shades Mountain, about 860 ft, 11 miles southeast.
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 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 27×. 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, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Dolostone, chert. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 0.6 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 Sylvan Springs reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Short Creek, the Locust Fork, the Black Warrior, the Tombigbee and the Mobile: about 410 river miles.
170 miles of the trip are on the Tombigbee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Sylvan Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sylvan Springs has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 34° in January. About 56 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Sylvan Springs normally reaches 66° and falls to 42°. The record high is 81°, in 1993; the record low 23°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 2.09 in, fell in 1998.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1977 at Bessemer 3 WSW, 8 miles south, 240 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
