The Ransom 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
Showers likely
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
85° on Nov. 12, 1989, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1949. Next is 84° in 1999.
Ransom’s center stands about 2,520 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,430 ft to 2,530 ft, a difference of 100 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 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 50×. 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 11 mi of the line.
Shale, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Arkose. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 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 Ransom reaches the Gulf of America by way of Page Creek, the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,060 river miles.
Lake on the way: Cedar Bluff Reservoir.
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 Ransom; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ransom has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. A normal year brings about 17 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 23 inches of water.
On November 14 Ransom normally reaches 56° and falls to 29°. The record high is 84°, in 1999; the record low 0°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.07 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1949 at Cedar Bluff Dam, 16 miles northeast, 380 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
