The Amarillo 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.
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85° on Nov. 16, 2021, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1892. Next is 85° in 2025.
Amarillo’s center stands about 3,670 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,510 ft to 3,690 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country.
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 39×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Late Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 12 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Siltstone-mudstone. Age: Middle Triassic to Late Triassic, 208 to 247 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone-mudstone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Clay, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, 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 Amarillo reaches the Gulf of America by way of East Amarillo Creek, the Canadian, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,570 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 Amarillo; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Amarillo has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 25° in January. A normal year brings about 17 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 20 inches of water.
On November 14 Amarillo normally reaches 62° and falls to 34°. The record high is 85°, in 2025; the record low 5°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.09 in, fell in 1924.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 from the Amarillo Area threaded record (Amarillo Airport, 6 miles east). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
