The Alta Vista 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.
Mostly sunny
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Sunny
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Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
85° on Nov. 17, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1964. Next is 83° in 1999.
Alta Vista’s center stands about 1,460 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,330 ft to 1,550 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Chase Group (shale, limestone), from the Permian, 252 to 299 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 42×. 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, limestone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 18 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 2 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 Alta Vista reaches the Gulf of America by way of Munkers Creek, the Neosho, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,450 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake, Ozark Lake and Council Grove Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Alta Vista; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Alta Vista has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. A normal year brings about 12 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 35 inches of water.
On November 14 Alta Vista normally reaches 56° and falls to 34°. The record high is 83°, in 1999; the record low 8°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.26 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1964 at Council Grove Lake, 13 miles south, 140 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
