The Clarksdale 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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82° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1897. Next is 78° in 1949.
Clarksdale’s center stands about 940 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 870 ft to 1,040 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Lansing Group (shale, limestone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 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.
Shale, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 18 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 6 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 Clarksdale reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Little Third Fork, the Third Fork, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,630 river miles.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Clarksdale; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Clarksdale has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. About 35 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Clarksdale normally reaches 54° and falls to 31°. The record high is 77°, in 1964; the record low 5°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.44 in, fell in 1931.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1897 at St Joseph Rosecrans Memorial Airport, 19 miles west, 130 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
