The Saline 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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18° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1972. Next is 23° in 1997.
Saline’s center stands about 200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 150 ft to 360 ft, a difference of 210 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Intermediate Terraces (clay, silt), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 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 10 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand, clay, lignite. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Clay, silt. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Clay, silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 Saline reaches the Gulf of America by way of Mill Creek, Saline Bayou, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 340 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 Saline; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Saline 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 Saline 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, 15 miles north, 110 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
