The Columbia 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.
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers; warmer
Chance of showers; warmer
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
18° on Nov. 14, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is 26° in 2014.
Columbia’s center stands about 110 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 40 ft to 250 ft, a difference of 210 ft: rolling country.
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 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.
Silt, clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Clay, sand, lignite. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 5 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 Columbia reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Ouachita, the Black River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 270 river miles.
100 miles of the trip are on the Atchafalaya.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Columbia; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Columbia has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 37° in January. About 59 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1940 at Columbia Lock, 5 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
