The Morgan City 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.
16° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 20° in 1997.
Morgan City’s center stands about 120 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 110 ft to 150 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 23 mi of the line.
Marl, sand. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 0.8 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 Morgan City reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Yazoo and the Mississippi: about 600 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 Morgan City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Morgan City has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 35° in January. About 52 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Morgan City normally reaches 66° and falls to 42°. The record high is 86°, in 1955; the record low 21°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 2.67 in, fell in 1998.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 from the Greenwood Area threaded record (Greenwood Leflore Airport, 17 miles east-northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.