The St. John 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.
Mostly cloudy
Showers likely
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
83° on Nov. 17, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1922. Next is 82° in 2025.
St. John’s center stands about 1,910 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,880 ft to 1,930 ft, a difference of 50 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Dune Sand, from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 St. John reaches the Gulf of America by way of Rattlesnake Creek, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,450 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 St. John; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
St. John has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. A normal year brings about 18 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 29 inches of water.
On November 14 St. John normally reaches 58° and falls to 32°. The record high is 76°, in 2025; the record low 4°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.78 in, fell in 1931.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1922 at Hudson, 9 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
