The North Platte 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, 2005, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1874. Next is 82° in 2025.
North Platte’s center stands about 2,810 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,780 ft to 2,870 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently 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.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 53×. 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 24 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 North Platte reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,080 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 North Platte; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
North Platte has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 12° in January. A normal year brings about 30 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 21 inches of water.
On November 14 North Platte normally reaches 53° and falls to 22°. The record high is 82°, in 2025; the record low −8°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.49 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1874 from the North Platte Area threaded record (North Platte Regional Airport, 5 miles east). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.