The Charleston 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.
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14° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1987. Next is 16° in 1997.
Charleston’s center stands about 330 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 310 ft to 330 ft, a difference of 20 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Holocene series (clay, silt, sand), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 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: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 22 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Paleocene to Pliocene, 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 Charleston reaches the Gulf of America by way of Black Bayou, Saint Johns Bayou and the Mississippi: about 940 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Charleston; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Charleston has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. About 51 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1987 at Cairo 3 N, 12 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
