The Dodge 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.
Chance of showers
Showers likely
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Chance of showers
87° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1874. Next is 83° in 1894.
Dodge City’s center stands about 2,500 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,460 ft to 2,620 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country.
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 56×. 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 17 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Arkose. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene, 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 Dodge City reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,530 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
640 miles of the trip are on the Arkansas.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Dodge City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Dodge City has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. A normal year brings about 19 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 22 inches of water.
On November 14 Dodge City normally reaches 58° and falls to 31°. The record high is 83°, in 2025; the record low 2°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.71 in, fell in 1947.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1874 from the Dodge City Area threaded record (Dodge City Regional Airport, 3 miles east-northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
