The El Moro 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.
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
−3° on Nov. 11, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1898. Next is −2° in 1916.
El Moro’s center stands about 5,920 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 5,790 ft to 6,870 ft, a difference of 1,080 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Fishers Peak, about 9,620 ft, 9 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pierre Shale, undivided, from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 6×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone, shale. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Arkose, siltstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous to Paleocene, 56 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 0.8 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 El Moro reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Purgatoire, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,900 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
850 miles of the trip are on the Arkansas.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of El Moro; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
El Moro has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 55 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 15 inches of water.
On November 14 El Moro normally reaches 58° and falls to 30°. The record high is 82°, in 1937; the record low 2°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 0.70 in, fell in 1925.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1898 at Trinidad, 3 miles south-southwest, 110 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
