The Jonestown 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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15° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1892. Next is 17° in 1916.
Jonestown’s center stands about 180 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 160 ft to 200 ft, a difference of 40 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (fine-detrital, coarse-detrital), 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.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 22 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 1 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 Jonestown reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Big Creek Deadwater, Oxbow Bayou, the Lower Quiver, Deep Slough, the Big Sunflower, the Yazoo and the Mississippi: about 740 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 Jonestown; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Jonestown has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in August; winter nights fall to about 32° in January. About 56 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Jonestown normally reaches 63° and falls to 42°. The record high is 86°, in 1955; the record low 18°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.83 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 at Clarksdale, 11 miles south-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
