The Quay 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.
Mostly cloudy
Showers likely; cooler
Mostly sunny; warmer
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
89° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 88° in 1911.
Quay’s center stands about 920 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 830 ft to 1,050 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Vanoss Group (shale, limestone, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 51×. 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, limestone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 1 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 Quay reaches the Gulf of America by way of Mud Creek, the Cimarron, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,150 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 Quay; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Quay has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. About 33 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Quay normally reaches 63° and falls to 38°. The record high is 81°, in 2020; the record low 10°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 2.50 in, fell in 1909.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the Stillwater Area threaded record (Stillwater Regional Airport, 21 miles west). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
