The Rockwell 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.
Mostly sunny
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
17° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1986. Next is 21° in 1986.
Rockwell’s center stands about 460 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 390 ft to 650 ft, a difference of 260 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is West Mountain, about 1,410 ft, 3 miles north-northeast.
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 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 23×. 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 13 mi of the line.
Chert, shale. Age: Middle Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 445 to 471 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Novaculite. Age: Late Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 384 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 0.8 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 Rockwell reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Ouachita, the Black River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 620 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 Rockwell; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Rockwell 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 Rockwell 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, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
