The Reader 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.
Reader’s center stands about 230 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 150 ft to 340 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bull Mountain, about 420 ft, 9 miles north-northeast.
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: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Sand, fine-detrital. Age: Early Eocene, 48 to 56 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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 Reader reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Little Missouri, the Ouachita, the Black River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 540 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 Reader; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Reader 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 Reader 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, 17 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
