The Morrison 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 cloudy
Showers likely; cooler
Mostly sunny; warmer
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
89° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 88° in 1911.
Morrison’s center stands about 940 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 880 ft to 1,010 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Oscar Group (shale, sandstone, limestone), 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 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.
Shale, sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.9 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 Morrison reaches the Gulf of America by way of Black Bear Creek, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,190 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 Morrison; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Morrison has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. About 33 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Morrison normally reaches 63° and falls to 38°. The record high is 81°, in 2020; the record low 10°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 2.50 in, fell in 1909.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the Stillwater Area threaded record (Stillwater Regional Airport, 10 miles south-southwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
