The Tuscaloosa 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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21° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1994. Next is 23° in 1997.
Tuscaloosa’s center stands about 220 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 110 ft to 300 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Sand Mountain, about 480 ft, 9 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvial, coastal and low terrace deposits (sand), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 46×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
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 Tuscaloosa reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of the Black Warrior, the Tombigbee and the Mobile: about 350 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 Tuscaloosa; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Tuscaloosa has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. About 58 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Tuscaloosa normally reaches 68° and falls to 44°. The record high is 80°, in 1999; the record low 26°, in 2013. The most rain on this date, 2.40 in, fell in 1998.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1994 at Tuscaloosa Acfd, 3 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
