The Fort Riley 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
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
5° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1965. Next is 6° in 1986.
Fort Riley’s center stands about 1,320 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,070 ft to 1,340 ft, a difference of 270 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Chase Group (shale, limestone), from the Permian, 252 to 299 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 59×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, limestone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 1 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 Fort Riley reaches the Gulf of America by way of Forsyth Creek, Threemile Creek, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,700 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 Fort Riley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Fort Riley has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. About 33 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Fort Riley normally reaches 55° and falls to 33°. The record high is 83°, in 1999; the record low 7°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.25 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1965 at Milford Lake, 5 miles west-southwest, 110 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
