The Nichols Hills 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.
14° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1996. Next is 16° in 2014.
Nichols Hills’s center stands about 1,200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,110 ft to 1,290 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Salt Plains Formation (shale, sandstone, siltstone), from the Permian, 252 to 299 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 55×. 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 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit 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 Nichols Hills reaches the Gulf of America by way of Coffee Creek, the Deep Fork, the North Canadian, the Canadian, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,240 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 Nichols Hills; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Nichols Hills has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 31 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Nichols Hills normally reaches 62° and falls to 40°. The record high is 82°, in 2025; the record low 18°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.20 in, fell in 2022.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Oklahoma City Wiley Post Airport, 6 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.