The Bradford 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.
9° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1883. Next is 10° in 2022.
Bradford’s center stands about 380 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 310 ft to 500 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Webb Mountain, about 620 ft, 11 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Loess (silt), from the Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 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.
Silt. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 23 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 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 Bradford reaches the Gulf of America by way of Bradford Creek, the South Fork Obion, the Obion and the Mississippi: about 930 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bradford; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bradford has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 56 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Bradford normally reaches 62° and falls to 37°. The record high is 81°, in 1931; the record low 12°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.90 in, fell in 1915.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1883 at Milan Experiment Station, 11 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.