The Morse 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
Showers likely
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Chance of showers
4° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1941. Next is 7° in 2014.
Morse’s center stands about 3,200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,120 ft to 3,290 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ogallala Formation (sand), from the Late Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 12 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 53×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Late Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 12 million years old. About 12 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 Morse reaches the Gulf of America by way of South Palo Duro Creek, Palo Duro Creek, the Beaver, the North Canadian, the Canadian, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,710 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 Morse; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Morse 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 12 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 21 inches of water.
On November 14 Morse normally reaches 61° and falls to 30°. The record high is 83°, in 2003; the record low 11°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.70 in, fell in 1985.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1941 at Gruver, 14 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
