The Smithville 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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85° on Nov. 13, 2010, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1954. Next is 83° in 2007.
Smithville’s center stands about 1,060 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 810 ft to 1,150 ft, a difference of 340 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Short Mountain, about 2,140 ft, 11 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Fort Payne Formation and Chattanooga Shale (chert), from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old.
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 29×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Chert. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Limestone, calcarenite. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 0.4 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 Smithville reaches the Gulf of America by way of Fall Creek, the Caney Fork, the Cumberland, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,390 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 Smithville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Smithville has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. About 58 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Smithville normally reaches 63° and falls to 34°. The record high is 81°, in 1993; the record low 15°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.80 in, fell in 1955.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1954 at Woodbury 1 WNW, 17 miles southwest, 150 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
