Conditions scored for whitetail deer, turkey and waterfowl across southwest Missouri, northwest Arkansas, northeast Oklahoma and southeast Kansas.
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Every score and every input, hour by hour for the next three days. Scroll sideways. Shaded columns are after dark.
The hills between Joplin and Springfield hold some of the best public-land deer hunting in Missouri, and the weather here turns over fast. A November cold front can drop the temperature twenty degrees between an evening sit and the next morning, and the wind that comes behind it decides where you can sit at all.
Dawn and dusk matter more than any weather variable — that is the one thing every GPS-collar study agrees on. Rut timing outranks the forecast too. What weather changes most reliably is not whether the deer move, but whether you can hunt them without being winded: how steady the wind holds, whether thermals are running up or down the hollow, and whether rain is going to wash away a blood trail before you can follow it.
Spring gobbling is the best-documented weather response of any game bird in this region. Rain shuts it down harder than anything else, and wind above about twelve miles an hour means you will not hear a bird even if he is sounding off. Calm, cool, clear mornings with a rising barometer are what you are waiting for.
Ducks run opposite to almost everything else. The wind that pins deer hunters down is what keeps birds moving and works your decoys, and the cold front that ends a pleasant week pushes new birds down the flyway. The best shooting is usually the clear, cold day right behind a front — not during it.
Joplin, Carthage, Neosho, Webb City, Monett, Nevada and Lamar in Missouri; Springfield, Republic, Ozark, Nixa and Branson east along I-44; Miami, Grove and Vinita in northeast Oklahoma; Pittsburg and Columbus in southeast Kansas; and Bentonville, Rogers and Siloam Springs in northwest Arkansas. Search any town, ZIP code or set of coordinates for a forecast at that exact spot.
Some of these numbers are more knowable than others, and we say which. Forecasting how cold a treestand will feel is straightforward physics. Forecasting whether a buck walks past it is not, and we do not pretend otherwise. A high confidence score can use the whole range; a low confidence one is deliberately held near the middle, which is why Movement Odds never leaves 35–75 however extreme the weather gets.
Wind and deer. If the deer number goes up on a blustery day, that is not a bug. Penn State put GPS collars on deer for three seasons and found something most of us did not expect: they moved least in dead calm, and buck daytime movement roughly doubled once the wind got above sixteen miles an hour. The sign flips after dark, though — deer move less on a windy night. Above 27 mph nobody has data, so we stop the number climbing rather than guess.
Solunar tables appear in their own section and carry no weight in any score here. Sunrise, sunset and moonlight genuinely affect activity; a direct link from moon phase to feeding does not have scientific support, and Doug’s forecast is not going to claim one.
Forecast data from the National Weather Service and Open-Meteo. Sun and moon times are calculated, not fetched. This page rates conditions only and says nothing about what is legally in season — check MDC, AGFC, ODWC or KDWP for seasons and regulations.