The Ralston 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.
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
88° on Nov. 11, 1989, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1922. Next is 86° in 2016.
Ralston’s center stands about 820 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 770 ft to 1,030 ft, a difference of 260 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Round Mound, about 1,000 ft, 5 miles north.
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 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 58×. 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, limestone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 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 3 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 Ralston reaches the Gulf of America by way of Eagle Creek, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,150 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 Ralston; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ralston has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. A normal year brings about 7 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 37 inches of water.
On November 14 Ralston normally reaches 63° and falls to 36°. The record high is 81°, in 2025; the record low 13°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.85 in, fell in 1978.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1922 at Ralston, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
