The Kismet 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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Partly cloudy; warmer
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86° on Nov. 12, 2005, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 86° in 2016.
Kismet’s center stands about 2,780 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,740 ft to 2,800 ft, a difference of 60 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Dune Sand, 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 50×. 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 12 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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 0.7 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 Kismet reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Cimarron, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,500 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 Kismet; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Kismet has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. A normal year brings about 14 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 21 inches of water.
On November 14 Kismet normally reaches 59° and falls to 29°. The record high is 80°, in 2007; the record low 2°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 0.58 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Liberal, 16 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
