The Lake Hamilton 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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17° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1986. Next is 21° in 1986.
Lake Hamilton’s center stands about 450 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 390 ft to 1,020 ft, a difference of 630 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is West Mountain, about 1,410 ft, 6 miles north.
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 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 22×. 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 15 mi of the line.
Novaculite. Age: Late Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 384 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 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 Lake Hamilton reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Ouachita, the Black River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 610 river miles.
410 miles of the trip are on the Ouachita.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lake Hamilton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lake Hamilton has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 33° in January. About 53 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Lake Hamilton normally reaches 64° and falls to 42°. The record high is 86°, in 1999; the record low 25°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.99 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1986 at Hot Springs Asos, 4 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
