The Loretto 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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Mostly sunny; warmer
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14° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1954. Next is 15° in 1968.
Loretto’s center stands about 830 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 690 ft to 910 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country.
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 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 46×. 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 16 mi of the line.
Limestone, siltstone. 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.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 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 Loretto reaches the Gulf of America by way of Clack Branch, Shoal Creek, the Tennessee, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,320 river miles.
Lakes on the way: White Lake (historical) and 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 Loretto; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Loretto has a cold desert climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. Barely 0.0 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Loretto normally reaches 61° and falls to 37°. The record high is 80°, in 1999; the record low 19°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.45 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1954 at Lawrenceburg Filt Plant, 12 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
