The Poplar-Cotton Center 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.
88° on Nov. 12, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1913. Next is 84° in 1953.
Poplar-Cotton Center’s center stands about 370 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 330 ft to 400 ft, a difference of 70 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Rocky Hill, about 1,770 ft, 11 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Quaternary alluvium and marine deposits (coarse-detrital), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 17×. 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. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 18 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Peridotite, serpentinite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Jurassic, 175 to 1,000 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Basalt, serpentinite. Age: Ordovician to Permian, 252 to 487 million years old. About 0.5 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.
Poplar-Cotton Center has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 96° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in December. About 12 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Poplar-Cotton Center normally reaches 66° and falls to 42°. The record high is 81°, in 2025; the record low 24°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 0.98 in, fell in 1953.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1913 at Lindsay, 11 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.