The Fort Smith 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
87° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1882. Next is 86° in 1955.
Fort Smith’s center stands about 440 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 390 ft to 650 ft, a difference of 260 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Winset Mountain, about 1,090 ft, 14 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows McAlester Formation (shale, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 29×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sandstone, black-shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. 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. 1 smaller unit 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 Fort Smith reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 910 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 Fort Smith; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Fort Smith 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 Fort Smith 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, 4 miles south-southeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
