The Valley Brook 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.
86° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1890. Next is 85° in 2025.
Valley Brook’s center stands about 1,270 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,200 ft to 1,330 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Fairmont Shale, 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.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 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.
Siltstone, sandstone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 4 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 Valley Brook reaches the Gulf of America by way of Crooked Oak Creek, the North Canadian, the Canadian, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,260 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 Valley Brook; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Valley Brook has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. A normal year brings about 7 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 36 inches of water.
On November 14 Valley Brook normally reaches 61° and falls to 38°. The record high is 82°, in 2025; the record low 14°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.56 in, fell in 1924.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1890 from the Oklahoma City Area threaded record (Oklahoma City Will Rogers World Airport, 7 miles west). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.