The Shelby 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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5.16 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1901. The next wettest, 3.85 inches, fell in 2015.
Shelby’s center stands about 160 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 140 ft to 170 ft, a difference of 30 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.
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 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 Shelby reaches the Gulf of America by way of Jones Bayou, the Big Sunflower, the Yazoo and the Mississippi: about 640 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 Shelby; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Shelby has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in August; winter nights fall to about 33° in January. About 59 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Shelby normally reaches 64° and falls to 42°. The record high is 86°, in 1955; the record low 18°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 3.06 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1901 at Cleveland, 15 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
