The Rose Hill 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.
78° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1966. Next is 76° in 1993.
Rose Hill’s center stands about 1,460 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,390 ft to 2,600 ft, a difference of 1,210 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Brush Mountain, about 3,390 ft, 10 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Hardy Creek Limestone through Dot Limestone, from the Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old.
The section below crosses 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 9×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Conglomerate. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Cambrian to Ordovician, 445 to 542 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 2 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 Rose Hill reaches the Gulf of America by way of Indian Creek, the Powell, the Clinch, the Tennessee, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,750 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Guntersville Lake, White Lake (historical), Pickwick Lake and Cummings 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 Rose Hill; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Rose Hill has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. A normal year brings about 8 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 55 inches of water.
On November 14 Rose Hill normally reaches 58° and falls to 31°. The record high is 75°, in 1989; the record low 12°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.58 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1966 at Tazewell, 18 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.