The Kanopolis 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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0° on Nov. 13, 1940, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1904. Next is 1° in 1932.
Kanopolis’s center stands about 1,580 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,490 ft to 1,650 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (sand, silt, clay), from the Pleistocene, 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 52×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Claystone, mudstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.4 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 Kanopolis reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,900 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 Kanopolis; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Kanopolis has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 16 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 31 inches of water.
On November 14 Kanopolis normally reaches 57° and falls to 30°. The record high is 79°, in 1988; the record low 2°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.87 in, fell in 1947.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1904 at Ellsworth, 4 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
