The Montezuma 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.
Showers likely
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Chance of showers
0° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1996. Next is 8° in 2018.
Montezuma’s center stands about 2,780 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,730 ft to 2,820 ft, a difference of 90 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 2 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 21 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 Montezuma reaches the Gulf of America by way of Crooked Creek, the Cimarron, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,560 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 Montezuma; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Montezuma has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 16 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 22 inches of water.
On November 14 Montezuma normally reaches 59° and falls to 29°. The record high is 81°, in 1999; the record low 8°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.27 in, fell in 2004.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Montezuma, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
