The Odessa 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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Chance of showers
5° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1991. Next is 10° in 2018.
Odessa’s center stands about 930 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 790 ft to 1,000 ft, a difference of 210 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pleasanton Group (shale, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 53×. 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, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 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 Odessa reaches the Gulf of America by way of Owl Creek, East Fork Sni-A-Bar Creek, Sni-A-Bar Creek, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,500 river miles.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Odessa; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Odessa has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 14 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 41 inches of water.
On November 14 Odessa normally reaches 53° and falls to 34°. The record high is 78°, in 1999; the record low 11°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.43 in, fell in 1994.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1991 at Higginsville, 14 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
