The Leawood 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.
7° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1996. Next is 11° in 2018.
Leawood’s center stands about 970 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 830 ft to 1,020 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Miller Hill, about 1,130 ft, 13 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Kansas City Group (limestone, shale), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 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.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 22 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.5 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 Leawood reaches the Gulf of America by way of Tomahawk Creek, Indian Creek, the Blue River, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,550 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 Leawood; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Leawood has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. About 38 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Leawood normally reaches 54° and falls to 35°. The record high is 75°, in 2025; the record low 12°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.08 in, fell in 2022.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Olathe Johnson County Executive Airport, 7 miles west-southwest, 100 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.