The Smith Center 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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Showers likely
81° on Nov. 11, 2012, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1910. Next is 81° in 2016.
Smith Center’s center stands about 1,810 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,700 ft to 1,880 ft, a difference of 180 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 37×. 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 13 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Arkose. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 0.4 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 Smith Center reaches the Gulf of America by way of Beaver Creek, the North Fork Solomon, the Solomon, the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,000 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 Smith Center; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Smith Center 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 18 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 26 inches of water.
On November 14 Smith Center normally reaches 54° and falls to 28°. The record high is 77°, in 1990; the record low −3°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 0.60 in, fell in 1947.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1910 at Smith Center, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
