The Franklin 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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Mostly sunny; warmer
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Showers likely
80° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is 80° in 2025.
Franklin’s center stands about 1,870 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,800 ft to 2,020 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Lookout Mountain, about 2,040 ft, 5 miles south-southeast.
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 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 49×. 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 18 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Siltstone-mudstone, conglomerate-sandstone. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 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 Franklin reaches the Gulf of America by way of Coon Creek, the Republican, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,930 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 Franklin; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Franklin has a dry-winter hot-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 14° in January. A normal year brings about 15 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 25 inches of water.
On November 14 Franklin normally reaches 54° and falls to 27°. The record high is 80°, in 1999; the record low −2°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.20 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 at Harlan County Lake, 14 miles west, 140 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
