The Cedar Vale 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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84° on Nov. 11, 1949, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 84° in 1989.
Cedar Vale’s center stands about 960 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 870 ft to 1,260 ft, a difference of 390 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Hogback Hill, about 1,150 ft, 7 miles north-northwest.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 32×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. 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. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 Cedar Vale reaches the Gulf of America by way of Cedar Creek, the Caney, the Verdigris, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,210 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cedar Vale; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cedar Vale has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 9 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 Cedar Vale normally reaches 60° and falls to 35°. The record high is 83°, in 1999; the record low 8°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.15 in, fell in 1924.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Sedan, 18 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
