The Columbus 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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22° on Nov. 17, 1997, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1981. Next is 22° in 2013.
Columbus’s center stands about 230 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 140 ft to 300 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Eutaw formation (Tombigbee sand member), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 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 8 mi of the line.
Chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Chalk, clay. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 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 Columbus reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Luxapallila Creek, the Tombigbee and the Mobile: about 340 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Columbus; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Columbus has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. About 57 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Columbus normally reaches 67° and falls to 43°. The record high is 81°, in 2011; the record low 22°, in 2013. The most rain on this date, 2.34 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1981 at Columbus, 3 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
