The Sparkman 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.
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
7.60 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1891. The next wettest, 7.26 inches, fell in 1978.
Sparkman’s center stands about 180 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 140 ft to 310 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bull Mountain, about 420 ft, 13 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 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 61×. 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 10 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sand, fine-detrital. Age: Early Eocene, 48 to 56 million years old. About 7 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 Sparkman reaches the Gulf of America by way of Cypress Creek, Beaver Creek, the Ouachita, the Black River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 530 river miles.
320 miles of the trip are on the Ouachita.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Sparkman; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sparkman has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 31° in January. About 55 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Sparkman normally reaches 66° and falls to 40°. The record high is 84°, in 1999; the record low 20°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.20 in, fell in 1915.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1891 at Arkadelphia 2 N, 20 miles northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
