The Mount Vernon 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.
Mostly cloudy
Showers likely
Chance of showers; warmer
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
87° on Nov. 11, 2006, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1966. Next is 87° in 2016.
Mount Vernon’s center stands about 480 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 380 ft to 520 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Wilcox Group, undivided (mudstone), from the Late Paleocene to Early Eocene, 48 to 59 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.
Clay, sand. Age: Paleocene to Eocene, 34 to 66 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Mudstone. Age: Late Paleocene to Early Eocene, 48 to 59 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.5 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 Mount Vernon reaches the Gulf of America by way of Denton Creek, Big Creek, White Oak Creek, the Sulphur, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 630 river miles.
Lake on the way: Wright Patman Lake.
320 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Mount Vernon; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mount Vernon has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in August; winter nights fall to about 34° in January. About 48 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Mount Vernon normally reaches 66° and falls to 44°. The record high is 84°, in 2005; the record low 23°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.55 in, fell in 1970.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1966 at Mount Vernon, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
