The Childress 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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92° on Nov. 17, 2017, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 91° in 2021.
Childress’s center stands about 1,950 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,860 ft to 1,980 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Whitehorse Group, undivided (sandstone, 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 49×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.3 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 Childress reaches the Gulf of America by way of Grassy Creek, the Prairie Dog Town Fork Red, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 1,210 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Childress; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Childress has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 96° in July; winter nights fall to about 29° in January. A normal year brings about 6 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 24 inches of water.
On November 14 Childress normally reaches 65° and falls to 39°. The record high is 89°, in 2025; the record low 16°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.20 in, fell in 1968.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the Childress Area threaded record (Childress Municipal Airport, here). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
