The Dry Prong 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.
20° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1976. Next is 28° in 1982.
Dry Prong’s center stands about 230 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 170 ft to 320 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows High Terraces (clay, silt, sand), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 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, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Sandstone, sand, volcanic. Age: Oligocene, 23 to 34 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Silt, clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.4 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 Dry Prong reaches the Gulf of America by way of Big Creek, the Little River, the Black River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 270 river miles.
Lake on the way: Catahoula Lake.
100 miles of the trip are on the Atchafalaya.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Dry Prong; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Dry Prong has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 39° in January. About 61 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Dry Prong normally reaches 66° and falls to 46°. The record high is 83°, in 1985; the record low 28°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 1.51 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1976 at Boyce 3 WNW, 17 miles southwest, 120 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.