The Olmsted 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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12° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1923. Next is 16° in 1997.
Olmsted’s center stands about 400 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 280 ft to 480 ft, a difference of 200 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Burner Hill, about 630 ft, 13 miles west-northwest.
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 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 60×. 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, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Paleocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Early Mississippian to Middle Mississippian, 331 to 359 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 84 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Tertiary to Holocene, less than 66 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Middle Devonian to Late Devonian, 359 to 388 million years old. About 0.8 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 Olmsted reaches the Gulf of America by way of Hodges Creek, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 990 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Olmsted; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Olmsted has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. A normal year brings about 7 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 49 inches of water.
On November 14 Olmsted normally reaches 58° and falls to 39°. The record high is 75°, in 1999; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.04 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1923 at Olmsted Lock And Dam, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
