The Hays 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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3.54 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1892. The next wettest, 2.13 inches, fell in 1971.
Hays’s center stands about 2,030 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,970 ft to 2,150 ft, a difference of 180 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 54×. 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.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Arkose. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 Hays reaches the Gulf of America by way of Big Creek, the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,020 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 Hays; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Hays has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. A normal year brings about 16 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 24 inches of water.
On November 14 Hays normally reaches 57° and falls to 28°. The record high is 82°, in 1999; the record low −1°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.76 in, fell in 1931.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 at Hays 1 S, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
