The Caledonia 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.
84° on Nov. 12, 2002, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1938. Next is 83° in 1964.
Caledonia’s center stands about 330 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 210 ft to 400 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Eutaw formation (sand, clay), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 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.
Sand, clay. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 0.3 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 Caledonia reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of the Buttahatchee, the Tombigbee and the Mobile: about 380 river miles.
310 miles of the trip are on the Tombigbee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Caledonia; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Caledonia has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 33° in January. About 58 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Caledonia normally reaches 66° and falls to 42°. The record high is 80°, in 1964; the record low 20°, in 1963. The most rain on this date, 2.36 in, fell in 1961.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1938 at Vernon, 12 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.