The Lost Springs 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.
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
84° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1918. Next is 82° in 2016.
Lost Springs’s center stands about 1,490 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,400 ft to 1,500 ft, a difference of 100 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Sumner Group (shale), from the Permian, 252 to 299 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 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.
Shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. 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 Lost Springs reaches the Gulf of America by way of Clear Creek, the Cottonwood, the Neosho, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,520 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 Lost Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lost Springs has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. A normal year brings about 13 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 34 inches of water.
On November 14 Lost Springs normally reaches 55° and falls to 31°. The record high is 84°, in 1999; the record low −3°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 2.72 in, fell in 1931.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1918 at Herington, 7 miles north, 150 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
