The Nicholson 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.
25° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1988. Next is 26° in 2025.
Nicholson’s center stands about 60 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 10 ft to 80 ft, a difference of 70 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Coastal deposits (fine-detrital, coarse-detrital), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 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, gravel. Age: Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 5.3 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 0.9 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 Nicholson reaches the Gulf of America by way of Alligator Branch and the Pearl: about 35 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Nicholson; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Nicholson has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 41° in January. About 62 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Nicholson normally reaches 71° and falls to 47°. The record high is 82°, in 2005; the record low 29°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 1.53 in, fell in 2022.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1988 at Slidell Airport, 12 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.