The Pretty Prairie 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.
Partly cloudy
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Mostly sunny
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Mostly cloudy
Showers likely
3° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1953. Next is 5° in 1986.
Pretty Prairie’s center stands about 1,570 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,530 ft to 1,620 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (sand, silt, clay), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
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 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.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 18 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Siltstone, sandstone, shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 0.6 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 Pretty Prairie reaches the Gulf of America by way of Smoots Creek, the South Fork Ninnescah, the Ninnescah, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,370 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 Pretty Prairie; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Pretty Prairie has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 9 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 30 inches of water.
On November 14 Pretty Prairie normally reaches 57° and falls to 31°. The record high is 82°, in 1999; the record low 7°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.57 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1953 at Hutchinson 10 SW, 10 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
