The Clayton 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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Chance of showers
3.25 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1962. The next wettest, 2.13 inches, fell in 1971.
Clayton’s center stands about 2,430 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,380 ft to 2,570 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (sand, silt, clay), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 50×. 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 14 mi of the line.
Arkose. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 Clayton reaches the Gulf of America by way of Prairie Dog Creek, the Republican, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,050 river miles.
Lake on the way: Harlan County 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 Clayton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Clayton has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 14° in January. A normal year brings about 20 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 26 inches of water.
On November 14 Clayton normally reaches 53° and falls to 26°. The record high is 81°, in 1999; the record low 1°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.22 in, fell in 2002.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1962 at Norton Dam, 14 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
