The Carthage 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
Chance of showers
Chance of showers; warmer
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14° on Nov. 14, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1977. Next is 21° in 1982.
Carthage’s center stands about 310 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 260 ft to 410 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Claibourne Group (sand, clay), from the Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 58×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand, clay. Age: Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sand, fine-detrital. Age: Early Eocene, 48 to 56 million years old. About 7 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 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 Carthage reaches the Gulf of America by way of Gum Creek, Pickett Creek, Cooks Creek, Jug Creek, Fritz Creek, Hurricane Branch, Caney Creek, Wahl Branch, Wolf Branch, the Ouachita, the Black River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 520 river miles.
230 miles of the trip are on the Ouachita.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Carthage; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Carthage has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 29° in January. About 55 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Carthage normally reaches 63° and falls to 39°. The record high is 81°, in 1993; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.33 in, fell in 1980.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1977 at Sheridan, 18 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
