The Turpin 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
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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.
Turpin’s center stands about 2,750 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,660 ft to 2,790 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ogallala Formation (fine-detrital, coarse-detrital), from the Pliocene, 2.6 to 5.3 million years old.
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 44×. 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, 2.6 to 5.3 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 5.3 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.9 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 Turpin reaches the Gulf of America by way of Short Creek, 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 Turpin; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Turpin 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 Turpin 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, 11 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
