The St. Francis 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.
Cloudy
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
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Mostly sunny
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Chance of showers
−7° on Nov. 13, 2014, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1949. Next is −4° in 1955.
St. Francis’s center stands about 3,320 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,250 ft to 3,480 ft, a difference of 230 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (sand, silt, clay), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 36×. 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 12 mi of the line.
Arkose. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 0.5 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 St. Francis reaches the Gulf of America by way of the South Fork Republican, the Republican, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,140 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Harlan County Lake and Swanson Lake.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of St. Francis; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
St. Francis has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. A normal year brings about 24 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 18 inches of water.
On November 14 St. Francis normally reaches 54° and falls to 26°. The record high is 78°, in 1999; the record low −7°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.05 in, fell in 2005.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1949 at Bonny Dam 2 NE, 19 miles west-southwest, 400 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
