The Alma 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.
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87° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1882. Next is 86° in 1955.
Alma’s center stands about 440 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 390 ft to 800 ft, a difference of 410 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Meadow Mountain, about 1,900 ft, 13 miles north.
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 16×. 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, black-shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.4 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.1 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 Alma reaches the Gulf of America by way of Little Frog Bayou, Frog Bayou, Cottonwood Slough, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 900 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Alma; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Alma has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 30° in January. About 47 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Alma normally reaches 64° and falls to 40°. The record high is 82°, in 2011; the record low 19°, in 1963. The most rain on this date, 2.81 in, fell in 1994.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1882 from the Fort Smith Area threaded record (Fort Smith Regional Airport, 13 miles southwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
