The Salina 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.
Salina’s center stands about 630 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 620 ft to 910 ft, a difference of 290 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Hadley Mountain, about 960 ft, 15 miles south-southwest.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 31×. 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 12 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 4 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 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 Salina reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Neosho, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,060 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 Salina; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Salina 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 Salina 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, 9 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
