The Meriden 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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84° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1887. Next is 80° in 1949.
Meriden’s center stands about 990 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 900 ft to 1,090 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Wabaunsee Group (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 53×. 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: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 Meriden reaches the Gulf of America by way of Muddy Creek, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,610 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 Meriden; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Meriden has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. A normal year brings about 17 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 36 inches of water.
On November 14 Meriden normally reaches 56° and falls to 34°. The record high is 77°, in 1897; the record low 6°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.90 in, fell in 1931.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1887 from the Topeka Area threaded record (Topeka Asos, 9 miles south-southwest, 110 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
