The Cairo 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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14° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1987. Next is 16° in 1997.
Cairo’s center stands about 320 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 280 ft to 360 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Clayton Formation, Porters Creek Formation, Claiborne Formation, Wilcox Formation (shale, sandstone), from the Paleocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 66 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 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, silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Tertiary to Holocene, less than 66 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Paleocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 0.3 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 Cairo reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 980 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cairo; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cairo has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. About 51 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1987 at Cairo 3 N, 2 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
