The Marthaville 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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21° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 22° in 1940.
Marthaville’s center stands about 250 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 170 ft to 390 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Wilcox Group (undifferentiated) (sand, clay, lignite), from the Paleocene, 56 to 66 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 63×. 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 11 mi of the line.
Sand, clay, lignite. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 11 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 Marthaville reaches the Gulf of America by way of Brushy Creek, the Bayou Dupont, the Little River, the Johnson Chute, the Bayou Pierre, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 340 river miles.
170 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Marthaville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Marthaville has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 38° in January. About 55 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Marthaville normally reaches 69° and falls to 45°. The record high is 86°, in 1955; the record low 25°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.90 in, fell in 1998.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the Natchitoches Area threaded record (Natchitoches #2, 19 miles east-northeast, 110 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
