The Pontotoc 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.
Sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
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Partly cloudy
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14° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1953. Next is 18° in 1997.
Pontotoc’s center stands about 490 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 370 ft to 540 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Prairie Bluff chalk and Owl Creek formation (chalk, clay), 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.
Clay. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand, clay, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Chalk, clay. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million 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 Pontotoc reaches the Gulf of America by way of Lyon Creek, Lappatubby Creek, the Little Tallahatchie, the Tallahatchie, the Yazoo and the Mississippi: about 820 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 Pontotoc; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Pontotoc has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 31° in January. About 61 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Pontotoc normally reaches 63° and falls to 42°. The record high is 84°, in 1955; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.31 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1953 at Pontotoc Experiment Sta, 8 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
