The New Madrid 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.
11° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1924. Next is 14° in 1940.
New Madrid’s center stands about 300 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 260 ft to 310 ft, a difference of 50 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Holocene series (clay, silt, sand), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 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.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 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.
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.
New Madrid has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. About 53 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 New Madrid normally reaches 59° and falls to 39°. The record high is 83°, in 1955; the record low 14°, in 2022. The most rain on this date, 1.48 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1924 at Samburg W. L. Refuge, 16 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.