The Frontenac 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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12° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 14° in 1950.
Frontenac’s center stands about 960 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 910 ft to 980 ft, a difference of 70 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cherokee Group (sandstone, shale), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 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 Frontenac reaches the Gulf of America by way of First Cow Creek, Cow Creek, the Spring, the Neosho, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,200 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 Frontenac; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Frontenac has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. A normal year brings about 10 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 48 inches of water.
On November 14 Frontenac normally reaches 58° and falls to 36°. The record high is 77°, in 2025; the record low 16°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 2.70 in, fell in 1985.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Pittsburg, 5 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
