The Rainsville 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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76° on Nov. 12, 2010, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1901. Next is 75° in 1955.
Rainsville’s center stands about 670 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 600 ft to 790 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Raccoon Creek Group (shale, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 45×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 11 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 Rainsville reaches the Gulf of America by way of Big Pine Creek, Big Bayou, the Wabash River Old Channel, the Old Channel Wabash, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,390 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Rainsville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Rainsville has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. A normal year brings about 19 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 Rainsville normally reaches 50° and falls to 32°. The record high is 75°, in 1955; the record low 8°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.95 in, fell in 1959.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1901 at West Lafayette 6 NW, 18 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
