The Temple 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.
Showers likely
Showers likely; cooler
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
92° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1912. Next is 86° in 2021.
Temple’s center stands about 1,010 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 930 ft to 1,060 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Garber Sandstone (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 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 0.8 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 Temple reaches the Gulf of America by way of Whiskey Creek, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 1,020 river miles.
870 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Temple; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Temple has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 97° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. About 28 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Temple normally reaches 65° and falls to 39°. The record high is 86°, in 2025; the record low 12°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.31 in, fell in 1923.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1912 from the Lawton Area threaded record (Lawton Municipal Airport, 22 miles north-northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
