The Little Rock 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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Chance of showers
65° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1943. Next is 64° in 1981.
Little Rock’s center stands about 1,230 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,160 ft to 1,320 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Volcaniclastic rocks of felsic to intermediate composition (felsic-volcanic), from the Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion 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 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.
Granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Biotite-schist, migmatite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Felsic-volcanic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 3 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 Little Rock reaches Hudson Bay by way of Little Rock Creek, the Red Lake, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 1,150 river miles. Past the border it runs north through Canada to Hudson Bay.
Lakes on the way: Upper Red Lake and Lake Winnipeg.
400 miles of the trip are on the Nelson.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Little Rock; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Little Rock has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 77° in July; winter nights fall to about −3° in January. About 23 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Little Rock normally reaches 35° and falls to 21°. The record high is 64°, in 2016; the record low −11°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.81 in, fell in 1944.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1943 at Red Lake Indian Agcy, 4 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
