The Lafe 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 sunny
Partly cloudy; warmer
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5.81 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1979. The next wettest, 4.02 inches, fell in 2011.
Lafe’s center stands about 320 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 280 ft to 490 ft, a difference of 210 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Terrace deposits (coarse-detrital, fine-detrital), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
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 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sand, fine-detrital. Age: Early Eocene, 48 to 56 million years old. About 0.6 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 Lafe reaches the Gulf of America by way of Big Creek, the Cache River Ditch Number 1, the Cache, the White River and the Mississippi: about 910 river miles.
620 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lafe; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lafe has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 52 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Lafe normally reaches 60° and falls to 39°. The record high is 77°, in 1999; the record low 18°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.73 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1979 at Paragould 1 S, 12 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
