The Portageville 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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86° on Nov. 13, 1955, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 83° in 1964.
Portageville’s center stands about 290 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 270 ft to 290 ft, a difference of 20 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 21 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million 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 Portageville reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Little River, the Right Hand Chute Little, Iron Mines Creek, the Saint Francis and the Mississippi: about 930 river miles.
690 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Portageville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Portageville has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 30° in January. About 55 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Portageville normally reaches 60° and falls to 40°. The record high is 82°, in 1955; the record low 17°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 3.00 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Caruthersville, 17 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
