The Prairie View 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.
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Showers likely; warmer
86° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 83° in 2016.
Prairie View’s center stands about 2,190 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,100 ft to 2,310 ft, a difference of 210 ft: rolling country.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 47×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Arkose. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 4 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 Prairie View reaches the Gulf of America by way of Deer Creek, Starvation Creek, the North Fork Solomon, the Solomon, the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,060 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 Prairie View; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Prairie View 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 22 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 23 inches of water.
On November 14 Prairie View normally reaches 56° and falls to 28°. The record high is 86°, in 1999; the record low −11°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.50 in, fell in 1947.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Norton 9 SSE, 15 miles west-southwest, 220 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
