The Ford 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
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Mostly sunny; warmer
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87° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1874. Next is 83° in 1894.
Ford’s center stands about 2,400 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,350 ft to 2,490 ft, a difference of 140 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 5 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 14 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Claystone, mudstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.7 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 Ford reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,510 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
620 miles of the trip are on the Arkansas.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Ford; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ford 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 Ford 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, 15 miles northwest, 180 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
