The Bowring 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. 11, 1989, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1920. Next is 85° in 1999.
Bowring’s center stands about 820 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 730 ft to 950 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Artillery Mountain, about 1,020 ft, 9 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Vamoosa Group or Vamoosa Formation (shale, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 50×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.1 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 Bowring reaches the Gulf of America by way of Mission Creek, the Caney, the Verdigris, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,160 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 Bowring; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bowring has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 8 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 Bowring normally reaches 61° and falls to 35°. The record high is 80°, in 1988; the record low 12°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 2.24 in, fell in 1985.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1920 at Bartlesville Municipal Airport, 10 miles southeast, 130 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
