The Cherokee 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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10° on Nov. 17, 2014, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1906. Next is 11° in 2019.
Cherokee’s center stands about 1,190 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,150 ft to 1,230 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Terrace Deposits (coarse-detrital, fine-detrital), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
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 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.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 2 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 Cherokee reaches the Gulf of America by way of Cottonwood Creek, the Salt Fork Arkansas, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,310 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Great Salt Plains Reservoir, 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 Cherokee; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cherokee has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. A normal year brings about 13 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 32 inches of water.
On November 14 Cherokee normally reaches 60° and falls to 36°. The record high is 82°, in 1999; the record low 12°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.66 in, fell in 1985.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1906 at Helena 1 SSE, 16 miles south-southeast, 160 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
