The St. Francis 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
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
80° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1951. Next is 79° in 1999.
St. Francis’s center stands about 2,990 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,790 ft to 3,020 ft, a difference of 230 ft: rolling country.
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 30×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Silt, sand. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Siltstone, sandstone. Age: Oligocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 34 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, limestone, siltstone. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Siltstone-mudstone, conglomerate-sandstone. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.4 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 St. Francis reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Little White, the White River, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,310 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Francis Case and Lewis and Clark Lake.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of St. Francis; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
St. Francis has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 11° in January. A normal year brings about 41 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 22 inches of water.
On November 14 St. Francis normally reaches 48° and falls to 23°. The record high is 76°, in 2025; the record low −21°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.41 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1951 at Mission 14 S, 15 miles east, 180 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
