The Nashville 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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83° on Nov. 11, 1989, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1871. Next is 81° in 1958.
Nashville’s center stands about 420 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 390 ft to 640 ft, a difference of 250 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Holt Knobs, about 1,180 ft, 15 miles south.
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 24×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone, calcarenite. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Chert. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 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 Nashville reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Cumberland, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,220 river miles.
Lake on the way: Bards 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 Nashville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Nashville has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 30° in January. About 50 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 5 inches of snow.
On November 14 Nashville normally reaches 62° and falls to 39°. The record high is 80°, in 1973; the record low 18°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 3.79 in, fell in 1915.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1871 from the Nashville Area threaded record (Nashville International Airport, 7 miles southeast, 170 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
