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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77° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1895. Next is 76° in 1911.
El Paso’s center stands about 750 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 690 ft to 760 ft, a difference of 70 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Shelburn-Patoka Formations undivided (shale, limestone), from the Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 307 million years old.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 307 million years old. About 24 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 East Branch Panther Creek, Panther Creek, the Mackinaw, the Illinois and the Mississippi: about 1,420 river miles.
1,190 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 hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. A normal year brings about 22 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 38 inches of water.
On November 14 El Paso normally reaches 51° and falls to 32°. The record high is 77°, in 1999; the record low 6°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.17 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1895 at Minonk, 12 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
