The Otis 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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2° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1909. Next is 4° in 1986.
Otis’s center stands about 2,040 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,950 ft to 2,070 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Carlile Shale (shale, chalk), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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 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.
Shale, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Claystone, mudstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 0.3 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 Otis reaches the Gulf of America by way of Walnut Creek, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,480 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 Otis; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Otis has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 12 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 27 inches of water.
On November 14 Otis normally reaches 56° and falls to 30°. The record high is 80°, in 1999; the record low 5°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.56 in, fell in 1931.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1909 at Great Bend 3 WNW, 17 miles southeast, 180 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
