The Wichita 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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84° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1888. Next is 82° in 1894.
Wichita’s center stands about 1,300 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,280 ft to 1,360 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (sand, silt, clay), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 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.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 21 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 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 Wichita reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,320 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Wichita; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Wichita has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 13 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 34 inches of water.
On November 14 Wichita normally reaches 58° and falls to 35°. The record high is 78°, in 1897; the record low 7°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.91 in, fell in 1931.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1888 from the Wichita Area threaded record (Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport, 5 miles west-southwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
