The Handley 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
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
84° on Nov. 15, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1934. Next is 80° in 1945.
Handley’s center stands about 670 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 600 ft to 1,780 ft, a difference of 1,180 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Payne Knob, about 2,800 ft, 12 miles south-southeast.
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 10×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 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.
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 Handley reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Kanawha, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,760 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Handley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Handley has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. About 46 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Handley normally reaches 57° and falls to 36°. The record high is 79°, in 1989; the record low 18°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.80 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1934 at London Locks, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
