The Chattanooga 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.
Showers likely
Showers likely; cooler
Chance of showers
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
92° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1912. Next is 86° in 2021.
Chattanooga’s center stands about 1,150 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,090 ft to 1,180 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Hennessey Group (shale), from the Permian, 252 to 299 million 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.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 0.4 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.3 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 Chattanooga reaches the Gulf of America by way of Persimmon Creek, Spring Creek, West Cache Creek, Cache Creek, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 1,070 river miles.
880 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Chattanooga; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Chattanooga has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 97° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. About 28 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Chattanooga normally reaches 65° and falls to 39°. The record high is 86°, in 2025; the record low 12°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.31 in, fell in 1923.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1912 from the Lawton Area threaded record (Lawton Municipal Airport, 16 miles northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
