The Cawker City 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.
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
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Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
81° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1964. Next is 81° in 2016.
Cawker City’s center stands about 1,500 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,450 ft to 1,580 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is North Hill, about 1,780 ft, 14 miles west.
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 55×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Shale, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 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 Cawker City reaches the Gulf of America by way of Waconda Lake, the Solomon, the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,950 river miles.
Lake on the way: Waconda Lake.
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 Cawker City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cawker City has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 14° in January. About 26 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Cawker City normally reaches 55° and falls to 27°. The record high is 81°, in 1999; the record low 3°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.19 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1964 at Glen Elder Lake, 6 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
