The Seward 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.
Chance of showers
Showers likely; cooler
Mostly sunny; warmer
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
14° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1996. Next is 16° in 2014.
Seward’s center stands about 1,010 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 950 ft to 1,120 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Garber Sandstone (sandstone, conglomerate), from the Permian, 252 to 299 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 62×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 21 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 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 Seward reaches the Gulf of America by way of Cottonwood Creek, the Cimarron, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,230 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 Seward; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Seward has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 31 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Seward normally reaches 62° and falls to 40°. The record high is 82°, in 2025; the record low 18°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.20 in, fell in 2022.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Oklahoma City Wiley Post Airport, 20 miles south-southwest, 270 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
