The Tonganoxie 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
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
5° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1996. Next is 8° in 2014.
Tonganoxie’s center stands about 860 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 820 ft to 1,090 ft, a difference of 270 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Nolan Hill, about 1,040 ft, 12 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Douglas Group (shale, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 46×. 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, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.8 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 Tonganoxie reaches the Gulf of America by way of Tonganoxie Creek, Stranger Creek, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,580 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 Tonganoxie; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Tonganoxie has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. About 36 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Tonganoxie normally reaches 56° and falls to 32°. The record high is 76°, in 2025; the record low 8°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.12 in, fell in 2022.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Lawrence Asos, 10 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
