The Shawnee 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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Chance of showers
7° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1996. Next is 11° in 2018.
Shawnee’s center stands about 910 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 730 ft to 1,030 ft, a difference of 300 ft: rolling country.
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 54×. 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: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.5 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 Shawnee reaches the Gulf of America by way of Mill Creek, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,550 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 Shawnee; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Shawnee has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. About 38 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Shawnee normally reaches 54° and falls to 35°. The record high is 75°, in 2025; the record low 12°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.08 in, fell in 2022.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Olathe Johnson County Executive Airport, 12 miles south-southeast, 160 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
