The Madison 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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4.05 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1896. The next wettest, 3.87 inches, fell in 1993.
Madison’s center stands about 340 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 270 ft to 430 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Jackson group (clay), from the Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old.
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. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 24 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 Madison reaches the Gulf of America by way of Bear Creek, the Big Black and the Mississippi: about 590 river miles.
420 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Madison; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Madison has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. About 57 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Madison normally reaches 68° and falls to 44°. The record high is 88°, in 1921; the record low 21°, in 1907. The most rain on this date, 2.27 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1896 from the Jackson Area threaded record (Jackson International Airport, 10 miles south-southeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
