The Stephens 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.
Sunny
Chance of showers
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
17° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 19° in 1960.
Stephens’s center stands about 250 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 180 ft to 320 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Claibourne Group (sand, clay), from the Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 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.
Sand, clay. Age: Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 6 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 Stephens reaches the Gulf of America by way of Smackover Creek, the Ouachita, the Black River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 500 river miles.
250 miles of the trip are on the Ouachita.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Stephens; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Stephens has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in August; winter nights fall to about 31° in January. About 56 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Stephens normally reaches 66° and falls to 40°. The record high is 87°, in 1955; the record low 19°, in 1963. The most rain on this date, 2.10 in, fell in 1970.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Magnolia, 12 miles south-southwest, 120 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
