The Gadsden 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
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14° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 17° in 1959.
Gadsden’s center stands about 430 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 340 ft to 470 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
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 17 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 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 Gadsden reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Middle Fork Forked Deer, the North Fork Forked Deer, the Forked Deer, the Obion and the Mississippi: about 900 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Gadsden; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Gadsden has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 29° in January. About 54 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Gadsden normally reaches 61° and falls to 38°. The record high is 80°, in 1964; the record low 18°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.65 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Jackson Mckellar- Sipes Airport, 13 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
