The Carlsbad 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
Chance of showers
Mostly cloudy; cooler
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
88° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1898. Next is 87° in 2021.
Carlsbad’s center stands about 2,070 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,980 ft to 2,340 ft, a difference of 360 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is McLaughlin Mountain, about 2,390 ft, 6 miles west-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Quaternary deposit, undivided (coarse-detrital, fine-detrital), from the Quaternary, less than 2.6 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 34×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 113 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 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 Carlsbad reaches the Gulf of America by way of the North Concho, the Concho and the Colorado: about 700 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Buchanan Lake, Lake Marble Falls and Lake Lyndon B Johnson.
320 miles of the trip are on the Colorado.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Carlsbad; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Carlsbad has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 97° in July; winter nights fall to about 29° in January. About 21 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Carlsbad normally reaches 69° and falls to 39°. The record high is 87°, in 2025; the record low 15°, in 1976. The most rain on this date, 0.88 in, fell in 1994.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1898 at Water Valley, 7 miles northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
