The Goodland 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 cloudy
Partly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Chance of showers
82° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1895. Next is 80° in 1941.
Goodland’s center stands about 3,700 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,620 ft to 3,720 ft, a difference of 100 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.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 51×. 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 24 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 Goodland reaches the Gulf of America by way of Middle Fork Sappa Creek, Sappa Creek, the Republican, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,230 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 Goodland; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Goodland 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 Goodland 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, here). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
