The McCook 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.
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers; warmer
82° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is 81° in 1941.
McCook’s center stands about 2,590 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,450 ft to 2,670 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ogallala Group or Formation (siltstone-mudstone, conglomerate-sandstone), from the Miocene, 5.3 to 23 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 45×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Siltstone-mudstone, conglomerate-sandstone. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 5 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 McCook reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Republican, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,050 river miles.
Lake on the way: Harlan County 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 McCook; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
McCook has a dry-winter hot-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. About 20 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 McCook normally reaches 54° and falls to 26°. The record high is 81°, in 2025; the record low −14°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.62 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 from the McCook Area threaded record (Mccook Municipal Airport, here). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
