The Ringling 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.
90° on Nov. 16, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is 89° in 1911.
Ringling’s center stands about 900 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 820 ft to 930 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Wellington Formation (shale, sandstone, conglomerate), from the Permian, 252 to 299 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 62×. 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, conglomerate. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 3 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.
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 Ringling reaches the Gulf of America by way of North Mud Creek, Mud Creek, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 960 river miles.
790 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Ringling; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ringling has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. About 37 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Ringling normally reaches 65° and falls to 38°. The record high is 83°, in 1973; the record low 12°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 1.70 in, fell in 1994.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 at Healdton 3 E, 11 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.