The Parsons 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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11° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1962. Next is 19° in 1982.
Parsons’s center stands about 520 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 380 ft to 630 ft, a difference of 250 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Ward Hill, about 720 ft, 13 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Coffee Sand, from the Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old.
The section below crosses 9 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 48×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Chert. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Chert. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 3 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Parsons reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Beech, the Tennessee, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,170 river miles.
Lake on the way: Pickwick Lake.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Parsons; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Parsons has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. About 55 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Parsons normally reaches 61° and falls to 37°. The record high is 79°, in 1978; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.70 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1962 at Lexington, 15 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
