The Clarita 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; cooler
Mostly sunny; warmer
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
84° on Nov. 16, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1947. Next is 83° in 2016.
Clarita’s center stands about 690 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 620 ft to 920 ft, a difference of 300 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Lookout Mountain, about 1,090 ft, 15 miles west-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Delaware Creek Shale, from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old.
The section below crosses 13 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 35×. 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 6 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale, sandstone. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 7 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Clarita reaches the Gulf of America by way of Delaware Creek, the Old Channel, Clear Boggy Creek, Muddy Boggy Creek, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 830 river miles.
590 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Clarita; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Clarita has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in August; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 46 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1947 at Centrahoma 2 ESE, 11 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
