The Taft 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
Mostly cloudy
Sunny
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny
11° on Nov. 15, 1940, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1905. Next is 11° in 1959.
Taft’s center stands about 600 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 510 ft to 750 ft, a difference of 240 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Conjada Mountains, about 1,000 ft, 15 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Boggy Formation (shale, sandstone), 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. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 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 Taft reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,020 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 Taft; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Taft has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. About 43 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Taft normally reaches 62° and falls to 38°. The record high is 81°, in 1999; the record low 15°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 2.08 in, fell in 1924.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1905 at Muskogee, 12 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
