The Clay 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
81° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1971. Next is 80° in 1999.
Clay Center’s center stands about 1,790 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,750 ft to 1,800 ft, a difference of 50 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Niobrara Formation (limestone, shale), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 7 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 Clay Center reaches the Gulf of America by way of Little Sandy Creek, Big Sandy Creek, the Little Blue, the Big Blue, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,910 river miles.
Lake on the way: Tuttle Creek Lake.
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 Clay Center; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Clay Center has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. A normal year brings about 18 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 30 inches of water.
On November 14 Clay Center normally reaches 52° and falls to 29°. The record high is 80°, in 1999; the record low 10°, in 2022. The most rain on this date, 0.63 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1971 at Clay Center, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
