The Smithton 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.
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy; warmer
Sunny
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
5° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1996. Next is 9° in 2018.
Smithton’s center stands about 880 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 730 ft to 900 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country.
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 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 16 mi of the line.
Limestone, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone, sandstone. Age: Early Devonian to Late Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 0.5 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 Smithton reaches the Gulf of America by way of Flat Creek, the Lamine, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,450 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 Smithton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Smithton has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. About 36 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Smithton normally reaches 54° and falls to 35°. The record high is 78°, in 2025; the record low 9°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.41 in, fell in 2020.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Sedalia Memorial Airport, 5 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
