The Etowah 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.
Chance of showers
Showers likely; cooler
Chance of showers; warmer
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
3.48 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1894. The next wettest, 3.15 inches, fell in 1899.
Etowah’s center stands about 1,150 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,010 ft to 1,200 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Garber Sandstone (sandstone, conglomerate), 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 9 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million 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 Etowah reaches the Gulf of America by way of Bourbonais Creek, Spring Creek, the Little River, the Canadian, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,160 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Etowah; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Etowah has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 38 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 4 inches of snow.
On November 14 Etowah normally reaches 62° and falls to 39°. The record high is 81°, in 2025; the record low 13°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.36 in, fell in 1928.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 at Norman 3 SSE, 16 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
