The Prescott 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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15° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1890. Next is 17° in 1959.
Prescott’s center stands about 330 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 250 ft to 410 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Rocky Mound Hill, about 500 ft, 12 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Midway Group (clay, marl), from the Paleocene, 56 to 66 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 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.
Clay, marl. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Marlstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, fine-detrital. Age: Early Eocene, 48 to 56 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 Prescott reaches the Gulf of America by way of Mill Branch, Onion Creek, Terre Rouge Creek, the Little Missouri, the Ouachita, the Black River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 570 river miles.
310 miles of the trip are on the Ouachita.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Prescott; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Prescott has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 30° in January. About 57 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Prescott normally reaches 64° and falls to 40°. The record high is 84°, in 1955; the record low 15°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.46 in, fell in 1980.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1890 at Prescott 2 NNW, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
