The Kansas City 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
Partly cloudy; warmer
Sunny
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
3° on Nov. 13, 1986, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1888. Next is 6° in 1911.
Kansas City’s center stands about 900 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 710 ft to 1,000 ft, a difference of 290 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Kansas City Group (limestone, shale), 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 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.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 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 Kansas City reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,520 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 Kansas City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Kansas City has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 11 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 38 inches of water.
On November 14 Kansas City normally reaches 55° and falls to 37°. The record high is 81°, in 1964; the record low 10°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.52 in, fell in 1968.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1934 at Kansas City Downtown Airport, 2 miles north-northwest, 160 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
