The Topeka 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
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Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
84° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1887. Next is 80° in 1949.
Topeka’s center stands about 950 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 850 ft to 1,020 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Burnett Mound, about 1,110 ft, 4 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Drift (sand, silt), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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 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. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 1 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 Topeka reaches the Gulf of America by way of Shunganunga Creek, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,610 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 Topeka; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Topeka has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. A normal year brings about 17 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 36 inches of water.
On November 14 Topeka normally reaches 56° and falls to 34°. The record high is 77°, in 1897; the record low 6°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.90 in, fell in 1931.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1887 from the Topeka Area threaded record (Topeka Asos, 3 miles east-northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
