The Parsons 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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83° on Nov. 11, 1949, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1925. Next is 82° in 1999.
Parsons’s center stands about 900 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 860 ft to 950 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Marmaton Group (shale, limestone, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
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 9 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 Parsons reaches the Gulf of America by way of Little Labette Creek, Labette Creek, 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 Parsons; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Parsons has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 7 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 45 inches of water.
On November 14 Parsons normally reaches 57° and falls to 35°. The record high is 82°, in 1999; the record low 9°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.80 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1925 at Parsons 2 NW, 3 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
