The Madison 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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6.14 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1908. The next wettest, 4.76 inches, fell in 1957.
Madison’s center stands about 210 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 180 ft to 420 ft, a difference of 240 ft: rolling country.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 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 Madison reaches the Gulf of America by way of Crow Creek, the Saint Francis and the Mississippi: about 750 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Madison; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Madison has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 31° in January. About 51 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Madison normally reaches 62° and falls to 42°. The record high is 82°, in 1955; the record low 14°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 2.15 in, fell in 1980.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1908 at Wynne, 17 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
