The Manchester 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
84° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 83° in 2016.
Manchester’s center stands about 1,320 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,250 ft to 1,450 ft, a difference of 200 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 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 61×. 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 11 mi of the line.
Sandstone, black-shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Claystone, mudstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 0.8 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 Manchester reaches the Gulf of America by way of Mud Creek, the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,770 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 Manchester; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Manchester has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 12 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 34 inches of water.
On November 14 Manchester normally reaches 58° and falls to 35°. The record high is 77°, in 2025; the record low 6°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.06 in, fell in 1909.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Abilene, 13 miles south-southeast, 130 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
