The Burns 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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84° on Nov. 17, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 82° in 1949.
Burns’s center stands about 1,500 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,410 ft to 1,510 ft, a difference of 100 ft: gently 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 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.
Shale, limestone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 21 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 0.2 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 Burns reaches the Gulf of America by way of the East Branch Whitewater, the Whitewater, the Walnut, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,390 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark 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 Burns; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Burns has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. About 39 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 4 inches of snow.
On November 14 Burns normally reaches 58° and falls to 34°. The record high is 79°, in 2025; the record low 7°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.78 in, fell in 1985.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at El Dorado, 19 miles south, 210 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
