The Bells 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.
Chance of showers
Showers likely; cooler
Chance of showers; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
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.
Bells’s center stands about 680 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 590 ft to 770 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Eagle Ford Formation (black-shale, siltstone), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
The section below crosses 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 58×. 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 to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Marlstone, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Black-shale, siltstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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. 2 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Bells reaches the Gulf of America by way of Corneliason Creek, Mill Creek, Choctaw Creek, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 810 river miles.
660 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bells; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bells 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 Bells 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 east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
