The Kansas 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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83° on Nov. 16, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1923. Next is 82° in 1934.
Kansas’s center stands about 1,150 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,010 ft to 1,230 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Keokuk and Reeds Spring Formations and St. Joe Group (chert, limestone), from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 42×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Chert, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 22 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.3 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone, dolostone. Age: Early Ordovician to Carboniferous, 324 to 487 million years old. About 0.3 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 Kansas reaches the Gulf of America by way of Spring Creek, the Neosho, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,080 river miles.
Lakes on the way: 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 Kansas; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Kansas has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. A normal year brings about 6 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 47 inches of water.
On November 14 Kansas normally reaches 61° and falls to 39°. The record high is 82°, in 1999; the record low 13°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 3.15 in, fell in 1985.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1923 at Spavinaw, 20 miles northwest, 460 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
