The Ogallah 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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85° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1892. Next is 84° in 1999.
Ogallah’s center stands about 2,360 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,250 ft to 2,410 ft, a difference of 160 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 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 49×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Arkose. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 Ogallah reaches the Gulf of America by way of Spring Creek, Big Creek, the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,070 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 Ogallah; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ogallah has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. A normal year brings about 20 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 24 inches of water.
On November 14 Ogallah normally reaches 56° and falls to 29°. The record high is 84°, in 1999; the record low −4°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.57 in, fell in 1947.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 at Wakeeney, 8 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
