The Union 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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92° on Nov. 13, 1985, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 85° in 2005.
Union’s center stands about 320 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 210 ft to 410 ft, a difference of 200 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Eutaw Formation (sand, clay), from the Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 63×. 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, clay. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 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 Union reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Trussells Creek, the Tombigbee and the Mobile: about 290 river miles.
220 miles of the trip are on the Tombigbee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Union; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Union has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 33° in January. About 55 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Union normally reaches 66° and falls to 40°. The record high is 81°, in 1964; the record low 22°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 3.35 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Gainesville Lock, 17 miles southwest, 200 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
