The Irondale 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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Mostly sunny; warmer
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22° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is 24° in 1997.
Irondale’s center stands about 880 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 790 ft to 960 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granite Gneiss/ Amphibolite (gneiss, amphibolite), from the Precambrian to Paleozoic.
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 49×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Gneiss, amphibolite. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 11 mi of the line.
Amphibolite, biotite-gneiss, mica-schist. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 6 mi of the line.
Mica-schist. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 4 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 2 mi of the line.
Schist. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 0.7 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 Irondale reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Flint and the Apalachicola: about 430 river miles.
320 miles of the trip are on the Flint.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Irondale; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Irondale has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 32° in January. About 53 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Irondale normally reaches 63° and falls to 41°. The record high is 74°, in 2020; the record low 25°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.83 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1940 at Jonesboro, 3 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
