The Plainview 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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88° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1939. Next is 86° in 1955.
Plainview’s center stands about 420 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 340 ft to 810 ft, a difference of 470 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Potato Hill, about 1,560 ft, 14 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Atoka Formation - Middle part (sandstone, shale), 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 19×. 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 9 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 Plainview reaches the Gulf of America by way of Porter Creek, the Fourche LaFave, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 840 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 Plainview; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Plainview has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 31° in January. About 54 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Plainview normally reaches 64° and falls to 40°. The record high is 86°, in 1955; the record low 13°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.26 in, fell in 1947.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1939 at Nimrod Dam, 8 miles east-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
