The Riley 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
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
84° on Nov. 17, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1959. Next is 82° in 1999.
Riley’s center stands about 1,290 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,250 ft to 1,370 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Chase Group (shale, limestone), from the Permian, 252 to 299 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, limestone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone, 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 Riley reaches the Gulf of America by way of Wildcat Creek, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,710 river miles.
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 Riley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Riley has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. About 34 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Riley normally reaches 55° and falls to 30°. The record high is 78°, in 1990; the record low 4°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.22 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1959 at Tuttle Creek Lake, 13 miles east-southeast, 230 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
