The Edson 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
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers; warmer
82° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1895. Next is 80° in 1941.
Edson’s center stands about 3,560 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,480 ft to 3,600 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Loess (silt), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 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 22 mi of the line.
Arkose. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 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 Edson reaches the Gulf of America by way of South Fork Sappa Creek, Sappa Creek, the Republican, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,220 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 Edson; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Edson has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. A normal year brings about 30 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 19 inches of water.
On November 14 Edson normally reaches 54° and falls to 26°. The record high is 79°, in 2025; the record low −4°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.61 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1895 from the Goodland Area threaded record (Goodland Renner Field, 8 miles west-northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
