The Baker 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.
Showers likely
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Partly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
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86° on Nov. 12, 2005, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 86° in 2016.
Baker’s center stands about 2,840 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,790 ft to 2,890 ft, a difference of 100 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pleistocene and Pliocene deposits, undifferentiated (fine-detrital, coarse-detrital), from the Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 5.3 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 43×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 5.3 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pliocene, 2.6 to 5.3 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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 Baker reaches the Gulf of America by way of Sharp Creek, the Beaver, the North Canadian, the Canadian, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,610 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Canton Lake, Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Baker; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Baker has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. A normal year brings about 14 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 21 inches of water.
On November 14 Baker normally reaches 59° and falls to 29°. The record high is 80°, in 2007; the record low 2°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 0.58 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Liberal, 13 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
