The Jackson 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.
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
85° on Nov. 17, 1941, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1925. Next is 82° in 2020.
Jackson’s center stands about 770 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 720 ft to 1,280 ft, a difference of 560 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Nailors Rock, about 1,490 ft, 6 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Breathitt Formation, lower part (shale, siltstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 27×. 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, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 1.0 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 Jackson reaches the Gulf of America by way of the North Fork Kentucky, the Kentucky, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,710 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 Jackson; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Jackson has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. About 49 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Jackson normally reaches 58° and falls to 32°. The record high is 80°, in 1931; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.90 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1925 at Quicksand, 2 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
