The Ponca City 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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87° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 82° in 1949.
Ponca City’s center stands about 1,010 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 910 ft to 1,080 ft, a difference of 170 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 3 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, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 7 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 Ponca City reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,200 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 Ponca City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ponca City has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. About 34 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Ponca City normally reaches 60° and falls to 37°. The record high is 80°, in 1973; the record low 12°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.03 in, fell in 1985.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Ponca City Municipal Airport, 2 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
