The Hot Springs 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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7.22 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1875. The next wettest, 4.59 inches, fell in 1958.
Hot Springs’s center stands about 600 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 420 ft to 1,150 ft, a difference of 730 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is West Mountain, about 1,410 ft, 3 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Stanley Shale (black-shale, sandstone, siltstone), from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 20×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Black-shale, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Novaculite. Age: Late Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 384 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Early Ordovician to Middle Ordovician, 459 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Chert, shale. Age: Middle Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 445 to 471 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 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 Hot Springs reaches the Gulf of America by way of Hot Springs Creek, the Ouachita, the Black River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 610 river miles.
400 miles of the trip are on the Ouachita.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Hot Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Hot Springs has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 32° in January. About 58 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Hot Springs normally reaches 63° and falls to 42°. The record high is 82°, in 1955; the record low 16°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 3.02 in, fell in 1958.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1875 at Hot Springs 1 NNE, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
