The Mound Valley 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.
83° on Nov. 12, 1989, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1951. Next is 82° in 1999.
Mound Valley’s center stands about 830 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 780 ft to 940 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bender Mounds, about 1,020 ft, 10 miles north-northwest.
The section below crosses 4 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, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.9 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 Mound Valley reaches the Gulf of America by way of Pumpkin Creek, the Verdigris, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,180 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Oologah Lake, 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 Mound Valley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mound Valley has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. A normal year brings about 8 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 47 inches of water.
On November 14 Mound Valley normally reaches 57° and falls to 34°. The record high is 81°, in 1999; the record low 11°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.57 in, fell in 1985.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1951 at Mound Valley 3 WSW, 3 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.