The Empire 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.
Showers likely
Showers likely
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
92° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1912. Next is 86° in 2021.
Empire City’s center stands about 1,160 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,040 ft to 1,210 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country.
The section below crosses 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 56×. 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. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 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. 2 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 Empire City reaches the Gulf of America by way of Little Beaver Creek, Beaver Creek, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 1,030 river miles.
840 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Empire City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Empire City has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 97° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. About 28 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Empire City normally reaches 65° and falls to 39°. The record high is 86°, in 2025; the record low 12°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.31 in, fell in 1923.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1912 from the Lawton Area threaded record (Lawton Municipal Airport, 21 miles west-northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
