The Ward 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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14° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1918. Next is 18° in 1986.
Ward’s center stands about 250 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 210 ft to 340 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Des Arc Mountain, about 630 ft, 13 miles north-northeast.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 50×. 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 8 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, fine-detrital. Age: Early Eocene, 48 to 56 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Clay, marl. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 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. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 Ward reaches the Gulf of America by way of Mill Creek, Cypress Bayou, the Bayou Des Arc, the White River and the Mississippi: about 800 river miles.
620 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Ward; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ward has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 53 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Ward normally reaches 64° and falls to 38°. The record high is 82°, in 1999; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 3.88 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1918 at Cabot, 7 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
