The Fair Play 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. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1900. Next is 80° in 1911.
Fair Play’s center stands about 1,020 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 880 ft to 1,130 ft, a difference of 250 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Osagean Series (limestone), from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old.
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 46×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Dolostone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, mudstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Limestone, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.6 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 Fair Play reaches the Gulf of America by way of Bear Creek, the Sac, the Osage, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,590 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 Fair Play; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Fair Play has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. About 46 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Fair Play normally reaches 58° and falls to 35°. The record high is 82°, in 1999; the record low 7°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 3.52 in, fell in 1985.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1900 at Bolivar 1 NE, 10 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
