Regions of Kansas

This is the wet, wooded end of Kansas and the crowded one: a third of the state's people live in four counties that between them are barely two percent of its area. The storms arrive already mature, having crossed 200 miles of open ground to the west, and the same flat suburban grid that makes the metro easy to drive gives a squall line nothing to slow it down.

Wichita sits where the dryline stops. The boundary sets up over Pratt and Kingman through the spring, the storms fire on it in the late afternoon and they are supercells by the time they reach Sedgwick County — Andover was hit in 1991 and again in 2022, thirty-one years and four miles apart. It is also the driest big city in the eastern half of the state, and the first to feel a flash drought.

The Kaw Valley floods and the ridge above it does not, which is the whole forecast problem here: Topeka is built on both. The 1951 flood remade the city and the levees that answered it are still the reason the crest matters more than the rain. North of the river the ground opens into the glaciated hills, the last corner of Kansas the ice sheets actually reached.

Lawrence is the hinge between Topeka and Kansas City and gets the weather of both, plus the one thing neither has: the Wakarusa bottoms, which flood on their own schedule. South of it the country empties fast — Franklin, Anderson and Linn are farm counties with one town apiece and the Marais des Cygnes running through the middle of them toward Missouri.

The wettest corner of Kansas and the only one that was strip-mined. Forty inches of rain a year come off the Gulf into the Neosho and the Verdigris, both of which flood hard and often, and the mined land north of Pittsburg is pitted with the strip pits that filled in behind the shovels. Severe weather here arrives as a mature line rather than a discrete supercell — this is where Tornado Alley hands off to Dixie.

Manhattan sits at the mouth of the Big Blue with Tuttle Creek above it, which makes this the one place in Kansas where the reservoir release is part of the forecast. The Flint Hills start on the south edge of Riley County and the ground west of Junction City is already changing character — this is the seam between the tallgrass and the wheat.

Every road in Kansas meets here. I-70 and I-135 cross at Salina, and the country around the crossing is the transition zone the whole state is organised by — winter wheat to the west, corn and beans to the east, and a rainfall gradient steep enough that Marion and Mitchell counties are farming different climates 90 miles apart.

The Arkansas River turns east here and the whole region turns with it. Cheyenne Bottoms and Quivira sit inside the bend — the two most important shorebird stops on the Central Flyway, both of them shallow enough that a dry spring empties them. Hutchinson is built over the salt bed, 650 feet down, and the sand hills south of the river are the driest ground east of Dodge City.

The limestone under the Flint Hills is too shallow to plow, which is the only reason four million acres of tallgrass prairie are still here — the largest unbroken piece left on the continent. It burns every spring on purpose, and the smoke from the ranch burns is a forecast product of its own: on the wrong wind it closes the Kansas City and Wichita airsheds.

There is no timber here, so the settlers fenced with limestone: the post rock ledge runs through eight of these ten counties and the fence posts are still standing. West of Hays the chalk beds open up — Castle Rock and the Monument Rocks — and so does the climate, which loses about an inch of annual rainfall every twenty miles from Russell to Gove.

Dodge City is the windiest reporting station in the United States that anyone checks, averaging about 14 mph in the open, and the country around it is shortgrass rather than wheat because that is all the rain will carry. The Cimarron cuts the southern counties into breaks and canyons, and when a dryline goes through in March the fire risk arrives before the storms do.

Nothing here would grow without the aquifer. The Ogallala is 200 feet of saturated sand under these twelve counties and the center pivots on top of it are the reason the far southwest grows corn in nineteen inches of rain — and the reason the water table has dropped by more than half in parts of Haskell and Grant. Four of these counties are the only ground in Kansas on Mountain time.

This is the highest, driest, emptiest corner of Kansas — nine counties and 31,000 people, less than one town in Johnson County. The ground runs to 4,039 feet at Mount Sunflower on the Wallace County line, the ground blizzards close I-70 most winters, and the sky is close enough to Colorado that the afternoon storms here are built on upslope flow rather than the dryline.