The Mercer 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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14° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 17° in 1959.
Mercer’s center stands about 420 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 320 ft to 510 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Norton Hill, about 610 ft, 15 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Claiborne and Wilcox Formation (sand), from the Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 58×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 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.
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 Mercer reaches the Gulf of America by way of Big Black Creek, Cypress Creek and the Mississippi: about 890 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Mercer; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mercer 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 Mercer 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, 11 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
