The Nashville 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.
Mostly cloudy
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Mostly sunny; warmer
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9.12 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1899. The next wettest, 3.53 inches, fell in 1957.
Nashville’s center stands about 430 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 320 ft to 520 ft, a difference of 200 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Twin Knobs, about 580 ft, 13 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Tokio Formation (mudstone, sandstone), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
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 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.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Mudstone, sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone, marlstone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Marlstone, sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Volcanic, sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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 Nashville reaches the Gulf of America by way of Mine Creek, the Little River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 570 river miles.
390 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Nashville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Nashville has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in August; winter nights fall to about 32° in January. About 55 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Nashville normally reaches 66° and falls to 41°. The record high is 85°, in 1955; the record low 18°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.62 in, fell in 1947.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1899 at Nashville, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
