The Portis 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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Showers likely
81° on Nov. 11, 2012, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1910. Next is 81° in 2016.
Portis’s center stands about 1,550 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,500 ft to 1,750 ft, a difference of 250 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is South Hill, about 1,800 ft, 12 miles south.
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 58×. 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 13 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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 Portis reaches the Gulf of America by way of the North Fork Solomon, the Solomon, the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,970 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 Portis; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Portis has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. A normal year brings about 18 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 26 inches of water.
On November 14 Portis normally reaches 54° and falls to 28°. The record high is 77°, in 1990; the record low −3°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 0.60 in, fell in 1947.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1910 at Smith Center, 15 miles north-northwest, 270 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
