The Ponchatoula 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
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
23° on Nov. 15, 1969, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1956. Next is 27° in 1963.
Ponchatoula’s center stands about 30 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 60 ft, a difference of 60 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Prairie Terraces (clay, silt, sand), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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 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, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 9 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 Ponchatoula reaches Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of America by way of Selsers Creek, South Slough and the Amite: about 25 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Maurepas.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Ponchatoula; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ponchatoula has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 40° in January. About 62 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Ponchatoula normally reaches 70° and falls to 47°. The record high is 83°, in 2005; the record low 27°, in 1963. The most rain on this date, 3.80 in, fell in 1961.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1956 at Covington 8 WNW, 15 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
