The Sardis 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
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
11° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1962. Next is 19° in 1982.
Sardis’s center stands about 510 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 390 ft to 580 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Sand Mountain, about 740 ft, 10 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Sardis Formation (sand), from the Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old.
The section below crosses 10 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 63×. 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: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Tertiary to Quaternary, less than 66 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 4 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 Sardis reaches the Gulf of America by way of Little Hurricane Creek, Flats Creek, White Oak Creek, the Tennessee, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,200 river miles.
Lake on the way: Pickwick 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 Sardis; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sardis has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. About 55 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Sardis normally reaches 61° and falls to 37°. The record high is 79°, in 1978; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.70 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1962 at Lexington, 15 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
