The Athens 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.
Sunny
Showers likely
Chance of showers; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
17° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 22° in 1970.
Athens’s center stands about 320 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 260 ft to 470 ft, a difference of 210 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mossy Hill, about 490 ft, 14 miles south-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cook Mountain Formation (clay, marl), from the Eocene, 34 to 56 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.
Clay, marl. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 18 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 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 Athens reaches the Gulf of America by way of Leatherman Creek, Black Lake Bayou, Saline Bayou, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 400 river miles.
Lake on the way: Black Lake.
160 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Athens; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Athens has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 32° in January. About 57 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Athens normally reaches 66° and falls to 41°. The record high is 84°, in 1955; the record low 22°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.68 in, fell in 1970.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Homer 1 N, 11 miles north, 100 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
