The Sycamore 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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88° on Nov. 16, 1963, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 86° in 1989.
Sycamore’s center stands about 840 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 760 ft to 990 ft, a difference of 230 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bender Mounds, about 1,020 ft, 13 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Kansas City Group (limestone, shale), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. 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 4 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 Sycamore reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Verdigris, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,190 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 Sycamore; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sycamore has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° 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 Sycamore normally reaches 59° and falls to 36°. The record high is 83°, in 1999; the record low 11°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.94 in, fell in 1985.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Independence, 6 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
