The One Minute Geographer: The Great Plains — Temperature

Mean Daily Average Temperature. Map from Climate Atlas of the United States. Meridian added by the author.

Today we’re looking at mean daily average temperatures on the Great Plains using the 100-degree meridian as a reference point. You may think that using both mean and average together is redundant but it’s not: the average daily temperature is the average of the 24 hourly readings during a day. The 365 daily averages are then averaged out over a year and multiple years are then averaged to give us a long-term figure.

You can see from the map that along the meridian and all of the Plains we have a pretty direct north-south pattern ranging from less than 40° F in northern North Dakota to more than 70° F in the southern tip of Texas.

I thought it would be interesting to look at record highs and lows in each state along the meridian, so these are shown on the map below. In each state the site of the highest temperature on record is shown in RED and the record low temperature is shown in BLUE. The locations of the dots are approximate.

Record high (red dots) and low (blue dots) temperatures. Map from Britannica.com, cropped, and 100-degree meridian added by the author.

Record high followed by record low for each state:

North Dakota: Steele 121°, Parshall -60°