The Menlo 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.
Chance of showers
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Mostly sunny
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Chance of showers
82° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1950. Next is 81° in 1999.
Menlo’s center stands about 2,950 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,900 ft to 3,010 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Loess (silt), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 55×. 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 23 mi of the line.
Arkose. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 1 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 Menlo reaches the Gulf of America by way of Sand Creek, the South Fork Solomon, the Solomon, the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,140 river miles.
Lake on the way: Waconda Lake.
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 Menlo; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Menlo has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. A normal year brings about 27 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 20 inches of water.
On November 14 Menlo normally reaches 55° and falls to 25°. The record high is 81°, in 1999; the record low −2°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.23 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1950 at Colby 1 SW, 19 miles west, 220 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
