The Roland 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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85° on Nov. 16, 1941, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1890. Next is 85° in 1955.
Roland’s center stands about 290 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 240 ft to 660 ft, a difference of 420 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Moss Mountain, about 1,130 ft, 11 miles west-southwest.
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 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.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 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.
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 Roland reaches the Gulf of America by way of Mill Bayou, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 760 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 Roland; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Roland has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. About 51 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Roland normally reaches 61° and falls to 38°. The record high is 84°, in 1955; the record low 15°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 2.34 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1890 at Conway, 14 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
