The Clifton 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
Mostly sunny; warmer
Sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
8° on Nov. 16, 1940, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1891. Next is 10° in 1943.
Clifton’s center stands about 390 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 350 ft to 710 ft, a difference of 360 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Smith Hill, about 920 ft, 11 miles east.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 32×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Chert. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 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. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 Clifton reaches the Gulf of America by way of Pickwick Lake, the Tennessee, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,170 river miles.
Lake on the way: Pickwick Lake.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Clifton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Clifton has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. About 62 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Clifton normally reaches 61° and falls to 34°. The record high is 81°, in 1985; the record low 13°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.47 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1891 at Waynesboro, 15 miles east-southeast, 360 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
