The McConnell AFB 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.
84° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1888. Next is 82° in 1894.
McConnell AFB’s center stands about 1,350 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,270 ft to 1,400 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
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.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 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 McConnell AFB reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,310 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 McConnell AFB; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
McConnell AFB has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° 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 McConnell AFB normally reaches 58° and falls to 35°. The record high is 78°, in 1897; the record low 7°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.91 in, fell in 1931.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1888 from the Wichita Area threaded record (Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport, 9 miles west). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.