The Van Vleet 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
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
14° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1953. Next is 18° in 1997.
Van Vleet’s center stands about 360 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 290 ft to 530 ft, a difference of 240 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Witch Dance Hill, about 560 ft, 2 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Demopolis chalk, from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 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.
Chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Chalk, clay. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, clay, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 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 Van Vleet reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Dicks Creek, Chuquatonchee Creek, Tibbee Creek, the Tombigbee and the Mobile: about 410 river miles.
300 miles of the trip are on the Tombigbee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Van Vleet; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Van Vleet 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 Van Vleet 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, 12 miles north-northwest, 130 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
