The St. Francis 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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5.19 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1960. The next wettest, 4.72 inches, fell in 2011.
St. Francis’s center stands about 300 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 280 ft to 430 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country.
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.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 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 St. Francis reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Saint Francis and the Mississippi: about 930 river miles.
690 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of St. Francis; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
St. Francis has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. About 48 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 St. Francis normally reaches 61° and falls to 39°. The record high is 79°, in 1985; the record low 15°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.63 in, fell in 1970.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1960 at Malden Municipal Airport, 13 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
