The Vance 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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Partly cloudy; warmer
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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.
Vance’s center stands about 520 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 420 ft to 710 ft, a difference of 290 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Rock Mountain, about 850 ft, 15 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Copper Ridge Dolomite (dolostone, chert), from the Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 38×. 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 12 mi of the line.
Dolostone, chert. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 0.3 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 Vance reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Banks Creek, Hill Creek, Schultz Creek, the Cahaba, the Alabama and the Mobile: about 350 river miles.
200 miles of the trip are on the Alabama.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Vance; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Vance 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 Vance 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, 20 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
