The Whelen Springs 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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15° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1890. Next is 17° in 1959.
Whelen Springs’s center stands about 270 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 160 ft to 310 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country.
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 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, fine-detrital. Age: Early Eocene, 48 to 56 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Clay, marl. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 7 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 0.9 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 Whelen Springs reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Little Missouri, the Ouachita, the Black River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 550 river miles.
310 miles of the trip are on the Ouachita.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Whelen Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Whelen Springs has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 30° in January. About 57 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Whelen Springs normally reaches 64° and falls to 40°. The record high is 84°, in 1955; the record low 15°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.46 in, fell in 1980.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1890 at Prescott 2 NNW, 15 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
