The Ripley 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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85° on Nov. 14, 1955, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1890. Next is 83° in 1931.
Ripley’s center stands about 430 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 310 ft to 460 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Loess (silt), from the Quaternary, less than 2.6 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 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Silt. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 18 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: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 0.9 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 Ripley reaches the Gulf of America by way of Cane Creek and the Mississippi: about 830 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Ripley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ripley has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° 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 Ripley normally reaches 60° and falls to 39°. The record high is 85°, in 1955; the record low 18°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 3.00 in, fell in 1915.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1890 at Covington 3 SW, 16 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
