The Perla 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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16° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1883. Next is 19° in 1907.
Perla’s center stands about 340 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 270 ft to 530 ft, a difference of 260 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Shinn Mountain, about 830 ft, 12 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Wilcox Group (sand, fine-detrital), from the Early Eocene, 48 to 56 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 36×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand, fine-detrital. Age: Early Eocene, 48 to 56 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Black-shale, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Novaculite. Age: Late Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 384 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 1 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 Perla reaches the Gulf of America by way of Chatman Creek, the Ouachita, the Black River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 590 river miles.
380 miles of the trip are on the Ouachita.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Perla; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Perla has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 29° in January. About 58 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Perla normally reaches 62° and falls to 39°. The record high is 89°, in 1999; the record low 16°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 3.20 in, fell in 1980.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1883 at Malvern, 4 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
