The Dodson Branch 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.
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80° on Nov. 11, 2002, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1896. Next is 79° in 2006.
Dodson Branch’s center stands about 990 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 560 ft to 1,060 ft, a difference of 500 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Blaylock Mountain, about 1,950 ft, 13 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Fort Payne Formation and Chattanooga Shale (chert), from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old.
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 20×. 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 8 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.4 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 Dodson Branch reaches the Gulf of America by way of Dodson Branch, Spring Creek, the Roaring, the Cumberland, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,400 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Bards Lake and Cordell Hull Reservoir.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Dodson Branch; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Dodson Branch has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. A normal year brings about 6 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 60 inches of water.
On November 14 Dodson Branch normally reaches 61° and falls to 35°. The record high is 77°, in 1931; the record low 15°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.95 in, fell in 1915.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1896 at Cookeville, 14 miles south, 100 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
