The Seward 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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85° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 79° in 2025.
Seward’s center stands about 1,500 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,430 ft to 1,550 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Dakota Group (sandstone, shale), from the Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old.
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.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 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 Seward reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Big Blue, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,890 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 Seward; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Seward has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 12° in January. A normal year brings about 22 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 29 inches of water.
On November 14 Seward normally reaches 50° and falls to 27°. The record high is 73°, in 2025; the record low −3°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 2.25 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Seward, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
