The Hutchinson 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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Showers likely
3° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1975. Next is 8° in 2018.
Hutchinson’s center stands about 1,540 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,510 ft to 1,560 ft, a difference of 50 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.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 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. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.6 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 Hutchinson reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,370 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 Hutchinson; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Hutchinson has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 7 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 33 inches of water.
On November 14 Hutchinson normally reaches 59° and falls to 32°. The record high is 76°, in 2025; the record low 8°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.38 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1975 at Hutchinson, 2 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
