The Yates 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.
82° on Nov. 11, 1989, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 82° in 1999.
Yates Center’s center stands about 1,130 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 990 ft to 1,130 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country.
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 3 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.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 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 Yates Center reaches the Gulf of America by way of South Owl Creek, Owl Creek, the Neosho, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,300 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 Yates Center; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Yates Center has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. A normal year brings about 9 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 42 inches of water.
On November 14 Yates Center normally reaches 58° and falls to 34°. The record high is 79°, in 1962; the record low 9°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.76 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Yates Center, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.