The Caldwell 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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85° on Nov. 17, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is 82° in 1952.
Caldwell’s center stands about 1,150 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,090 ft to 1,200 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Loess (silt), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 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.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 3 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, sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 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.
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 Caldwell reaches the Gulf of America by way of Fall Creek, Bluff Creek, the Chikaskia, the Salt Fork Arkansas, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,280 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 Caldwell; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Caldwell has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 9 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 36 inches of water.
On November 14 Caldwell normally reaches 58° and falls to 35°. The record high is 80°, in 1999; the record low 9°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.58 in, fell in 1985.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 at Wellington, 19 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
