The Carlton 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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69° on Nov. 15, 2021, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1905. Next is 68° in 1953.
Carlton’s center stands about 1,320 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,240 ft to 1,400 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Iron Mound, about 1,480 ft, 14 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Sumner Group (shale), from the Permian, 252 to 299 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 53×. 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. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Sandstone, black-shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, 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 Carlton reaches the Gulf of America by way of West Holland Creek, Holland Creek, the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,770 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 Carlton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Carlton has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 11° in January. A normal year brings about 22 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 10 inches of water.
On November 14 Carlton normally reaches 42° and falls to 22°. The record high is 63°, in 2025; the record low −1°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 0.31 in, fell in 1906.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1905 from the Salmon Area threaded record (Salina Municipal Airport, 20 miles west-northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
