The Bailey 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 cloudy
Showers likely; cooler
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
6.05 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1903. The next wettest, 3.35 inches, fell in 1994.
Bailey’s center stands about 720 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 620 ft to 730 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Gober Chalk and Roxton Limestone, from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 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.
Chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.9 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 Bailey reaches the Gulf of America by way of Loring Creek, Spring Creek, the South Sulphur, the Sulphur, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 720 river miles.
Lake on the way: Wright Patman Lake.
320 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bailey; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bailey has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 33° in January. About 46 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Bailey normally reaches 65° and falls to 43°. The record high is 86°, in 1955; the record low 19°, in 1908. The most rain on this date, 3.30 in, fell in 1994.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1903 at Bonham 3 NNE, 14 miles north, 120 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
