The Thayer 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.
74° on Nov. 16, 2001, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1905. Next is 73° in 1964.
Thayer’s center stands about 1,120 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,030 ft to 1,220 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Kansas City Group (limestone, shale), from the Late Pennsylvanian, 299 to 307 million years old.
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.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Pennsylvanian, 299 to 307 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian to Late Pennsylvanian, 299 to 315 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian, 307 to 315 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Pennsylvanian, 299 to 307 million 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 Thayer reaches the Gulf of America by way of Fourmile Creek, the Thompson, the Grand River, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,610 river miles.
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 Thayer; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Thayer has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 11° in January. About 38 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Thayer normally reaches 49° and falls to 27°. The record high is 72°, in 1964; the record low −1°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 0.84 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1905 at Creston 2 SW, 18 miles west, 180 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.