The Fay 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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84° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1902. Next is 83° in 2025.
Fay’s center stands about 1,700 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,520 ft to 1,830 ft, a difference of 310 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Terrace Deposits (coarse-detrital, fine-detrital), 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 42×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 0.9 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 Fay reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Canadian, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,290 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Fay; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Fay has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. About 32 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Fay normally reaches 61° and falls to 35°. The record high is 83°, in 2025; the record low 12°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.63 in, fell in 1947.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1902 at Watonga, 14 miles east-northeast, 170 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
