The Jonesboro 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.
18° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1972. Next is 23° in 1997.
Jonesboro’s center stands about 230 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 140 ft to 340 ft, a difference of 200 ft: gently rolling country.
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: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Clay, marl. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, 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 Jonesboro reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Dugdemona, the Little River, the Black River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 380 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 Jonesboro; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Jonesboro 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 Jonesboro 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, 16 miles northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.