The Manchester 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
Mostly sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
80° on Nov. 17, 1958, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 79° in 1964.
Manchester’s center stands about 1,060 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 920 ft to 1,140 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Big Butte, about 2,030 ft, 10 miles east-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 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 17×. 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 11 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 8 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.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Conglomerate. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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. 2 smaller units 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 Manchester reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Little Duck, the Duck, the Tennessee, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,400 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Pickwick Lake and Normandy 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 Manchester; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Manchester has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 29° in January. About 61 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Manchester normally reaches 60° and falls to 37°. The record high is 79°, in 1964; the record low 18°, in 1907. The most rain on this date, 1.64 in, fell in 1915.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Tullahoma, 12 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
