The Oil City 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.
Mostly cloudy
Showers likely
Chance of showers; warmer
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
21° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1871. Next is 23° in 1940.
Oil City’s center stands about 200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 160 ft to 260 ft, a difference of 100 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Pine Hills, about 410 ft, 13 miles south-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Prairie Terraces (clay, silt, sand), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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 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.
Sand, clay, lignite. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 0.4 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 Oil City reaches the Gulf of America by way of Clear Lake, Twelvemile Bayou, Cross Bayou, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 440 river miles.
Lake on the way: Clear Lake.
260 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Oil City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Oil City has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in August; winter nights fall to about 37° in January. About 51 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Oil City normally reaches 68° and falls to 46°. The record high is 85°, in 1989; the record low 24°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 2.67 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1871 from the Shreveport Area threaded record (Shreveport Airport, 22 miles south-southeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
