The Bucyrus 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.
7° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1996. Next is 11° in 2018.
Bucyrus’s center stands about 1,110 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 990 ft to 1,120 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Lansing Group (shale, limestone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
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 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, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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.
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 Bucyrus reaches the Gulf of America by way of North Wea Creek, South Wea Creek, Bull Creek, the Marais des Cygnes, the Osage, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,700 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 Bucyrus; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bucyrus has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. About 38 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Bucyrus normally reaches 54° and falls to 35°. The record high is 75°, in 2025; the record low 12°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.08 in, fell in 2022.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Olathe Johnson County Executive Airport, 9 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.