The Middleton 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
Partly cloudy; warmer
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12° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 13° in 1940.
Middleton’s center stands about 450 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 380 ft to 580 ft, a difference of 200 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Porters Mountain, about 650 ft, 5 miles west-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Midway Group including Porters Creek Clay and Clayton Formation, from the Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 60×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Clay. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Claystone, clay. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 0.8 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 Middleton reaches the Gulf of America by way of Cypress Creek, Dry Cypress Creek, the Hatchie, Porters Creek, Cypress Creek and the Mississippi: about 960 river miles.
800 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Middleton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Middleton has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 56 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Middleton normally reaches 62° and falls to 37°. The record high is 81°, in 1931; the record low 13°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 3.09 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Bolivar Water Works, 15 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
