The Clay Center 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 sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
83° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1902. Next is 82° in 2016.
Clay Center’s center stands about 1,220 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,170 ft to 1,300 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Table Mounds, about 1,490 ft, 9 miles west-southwest.
The section below crosses 6 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.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Claystone, mudstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, black-shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 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 Clay Center reaches the Gulf of America by way of Spring Creek, Huntress Creek, the Republican, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,740 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 Clay Center; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Clay Center has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 11 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 32 inches of water.
On November 14 Clay Center normally reaches 54° and falls to 31°. The record high is 76°, in 1990; the record low 1°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.35 in, fell in 1909.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1902 at Clay Center, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
