The Water Valley 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.
11° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1936. Next is 12° in 1940.
Water Valley’s center stands about 400 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 360 ft to 500 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Continental deposits and loess, undifferentiated (fine-detrital), from the Tertiary to Holocene, less than 66 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 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.
Fine-detrital. Age: Tertiary to Holocene, less than 66 million years old. About 18 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 2 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 Water Valley reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Bayou de Chien, Obion Creek and the Mississippi: about 970 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Water Valley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Water Valley has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. About 55 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Water Valley normally reaches 60° and falls to 38°. The record high is 80°, in 1978; the record low 14°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.71 in, fell in 1959.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1936 at Martin U Of T Branch Experiment Station, 15 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.