The Ripley 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
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.
Ripley’s center stands about 870 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 800 ft to 960 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Twin Mounds, about 1,030 ft, 10 miles northeast.
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 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, limestone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
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 3 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 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 Ripley reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Cimarron, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,170 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 Ripley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ripley 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 Ripley 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, 14 miles northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
