The Bienville 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.
Sunny
Showers likely
Chance of showers; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
18° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1972. Next is 23° in 1997.
Bienville’s center stands about 260 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 200 ft to 330 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Driskill Mountain, about 560 ft, 7 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Sparta Formation (sand, clay), from the Eocene, 34 to 56 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.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Clay, marl. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.6 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 Bienville reaches the Gulf of America by way of Pea Vine Creek, Saline Bayou, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 360 river miles.
Lake on the way: Saline Lake.
160 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bienville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bienville has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. About 61 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Bienville normally reaches 68° and falls to 44°. The record high is 84°, in 1983; the record low 26°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 1.43 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1972 at Bienville 3 NE, 2 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
