The Halstead 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.
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3° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 6° in 1955.
Halstead’s center stands about 1,400 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,380 ft to 1,440 ft, a difference of 60 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (sand, silt, clay), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 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 10 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene, 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 3 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 Halstead reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Little Arkansas, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,360 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Halstead; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Halstead has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. About 28 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Halstead normally reaches 57° and falls to 32°. The record high is 76°, in 2025; the record low 14°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.27 in, fell in 2002.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Hutchinson Municipal Airport, 20 miles west-northwest, 120 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
