The Bethlehem 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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83° on Nov. 11, 2002, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 81° in 1964.
Bethlehem’s center stands about 410 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 290 ft to 500 ft, a difference of 210 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Hunters Hill, about 630 ft, 10 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Wilcox formation (sand, clay), from the Eocene, 34 to 56 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 57×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand, clay. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Claystone, clay. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 4 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 Bethlehem reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Tippah, the Little Tallahatchie, the Tallahatchie, the Yazoo and the Mississippi: about 780 river miles.
450 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bethlehem; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bethlehem has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 29° in January. About 58 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Bethlehem normally reaches 63° and falls to 38°. The record high is 80°, in 1999; the record low 17°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 1.05 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Holly Springs 4 N, 18 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
