The Smithville 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.
Mostly sunny
Showers likely; cooler
Chance of showers; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
13° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1985. Next is 17° in 1997.
Smithville’s center stands about 740 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 670 ft to 960 ft, a difference of 290 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Wilton Mountain, about 2,540 ft, 15 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Stanley Group or Stanley Shale (shale, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 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 12×. 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. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Novaculite, shale. Age: Silurian to Carboniferous, 324 to 445 million years old. About 0.6 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 Smithville reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Mountain Fork, the Little River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 660 river miles.
Lake on the way: Calahan Lake.
390 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Smithville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Smithville has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in August; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. About 58 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Smithville normally reaches 63° and falls to 36°. The record high is 85°, in 1999; the record low 13°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.80 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1985 at Battiest, 16 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
