The Sparks 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.
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
91° on Nov. 12, 2003, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1911. Next is 88° in 1938.
Sparks’s center stands about 250 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 230 ft to 310 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Miccosukee Formation (clay, sand, gravel), from the Tertiary Neogene, 2.6 to 23 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 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.
Clay, sand, gravel. Age: Tertiary Neogene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Dolostone, sand, clay. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 4 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 Sparks reaches the Gulf of America by way of Giddens Mill Creek, Bear Creek, the Withlacoochee and the Suwannee: about 230 river miles.
130 miles of the trip are on the Suwannee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Sparks; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sparks has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 39° in January. About 50 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Sparks normally reaches 69° and falls to 47°. The record high is 88°, in 1938; the record low 27°, in 1968. The most rain on this date, 2.68 in, fell in 2018.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1911 at Moultrie 2 ESE, 18 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
