The Ola 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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88° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1939. Next is 86° in 1955.
Ola’s center stands about 360 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 310 ft to 1,160 ft, a difference of 850 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Spring Mountain, about 1,840 ft, 14 miles north-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Atoka Formation - Lower part (sandstone, shale), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 18×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 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 Ola reaches the Gulf of America by way of Keeland Creek, the Petit Jean, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 830 river miles.
Lake on the way: Murray 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 Ola; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ola has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 31° in January. About 54 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Ola normally reaches 64° and falls to 40°. The record high is 86°, in 1955; the record low 13°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.26 in, fell in 1947.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1939 at Nimrod Dam, 6 miles southeast, 120 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
