The Sand Springs 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.
87° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 85° in 1911.
Sand Springs’s center stands about 680 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 620 ft to 970 ft, a difference of 350 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Holmes Peak, about 1,020 ft, 6 miles northeast.
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 44×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 Sand Springs reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,090 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 Sand Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sand Springs has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. A normal year brings about 9 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 41 inches of water.
On November 14 Sand Springs normally reaches 62° and falls to 40°. The record high is 79°, in 2020; the record low 13°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.72 in, fell in 1909.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the Tulsa Area threaded record (Tulsa International Airport, 14 miles east-northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.