The Altus 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.
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16° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1994. Next is 20° in 1997.
Altus’s center stands about 550 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 340 ft to 890 ft, a difference of 550 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Carter Mountain, about 2,170 ft, 11 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Harthshorne Sandstone, from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 13×. 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. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone, black-shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 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 Altus reaches the Gulf of America by way of Mikes Creek, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 870 river miles.
Lake on the way: Murray 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 Altus; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Altus has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 52 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Altus normally reaches 61° and falls to 39°. The record high is 79°, in 2011; the record low 19°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.82 in, fell in 1994.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1994 at Ozark 2, 7 miles northwest, 280 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
