The Mount Carmel 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.
4.05 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1977. The next wettest, 3.42 inches, fell in 1987.
Mount Carmel’s center stands about 260 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 60 ft to 280 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Citronelle Formation (sand), from the Late Pliocene, 2.6 to 3.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 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.
Sand. Age: Late Pliocene, 2.6 to 3.6 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 5.3 million years old. About 2 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 Mount Carmel reaches Pensacola Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Mount Carmel Springs Branch, the Conecuh, the Escambia and the Dead: about 55 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Mount Carmel; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mount Carmel has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 38° in January. About 72 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Mount Carmel normally reaches 68° and falls to 44°. The record high is 82°, in 1993; the record low 25°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.84 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1977 at Brewton 3 ENE, 12 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.