The El Paso 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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14° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1918. Next is 18° in 1986.
El Paso’s center stands about 340 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 260 ft to 570 ft, a difference of 310 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Wortham Hill, about 880 ft, 12 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Atoka Formation - Upper part (sandstone, shale), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 39×. 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, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million 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 El Paso reaches the Gulf of America by way of Jackson Branch, Little Cypress Creek, Cypress Bayou, the Bayou Des Arc, the White River and the Mississippi: about 820 river miles.
620 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of El Paso; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
El Paso has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 53 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 El Paso normally reaches 64° and falls to 38°. The record high is 82°, in 1999; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 3.88 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1918 at Cabot, 10 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
