The Surprise 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
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Showers likely
−3° on Nov. 16, 2014, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1978. Next is −2° in 2019.
Surprise’s center stands about 1,540 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,520 ft to 1,620 ft, a difference of 100 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Greenhorn Limestone and Graneros Shale (shale, limestone), 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.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 19 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 6 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 Surprise reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Big Blue, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,940 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 Surprise; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Surprise 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 24 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 28 inches of water.
On November 14 Surprise normally reaches 51° and falls to 26°. The record high is 84°, in 1999; the record low 1°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.19 in, fell in 2021.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1978 at Surprise, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
