The Arcadia 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.
86° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1890. Next is 85° in 2025.
Arcadia’s center stands about 970 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 940 ft to 1,140 ft, a difference of 200 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (fine-detrital), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 55×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 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 Arcadia reaches the Gulf of America by way of Soldier Creek, the Deep Fork, the North Canadian, the Canadian, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,220 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Arcadia; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Arcadia has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. A normal year brings about 7 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 36 inches of water.
On November 14 Arcadia normally reaches 61° and falls to 38°. The record high is 82°, in 2025; the record low 14°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.56 in, fell in 1924.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1890 from the Oklahoma City Area threaded record (Oklahoma City Will Rogers World Airport, 25 miles southwest, 310 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.