The Cienegas Terrace 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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Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly cloudy; cooler
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25° on Nov. 16, 1916, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1905. Next is 25° in 2018.
Cienegas Terrace’s center stands about 960 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 880 ft to 1,090 ft, a difference of 210 ft: rolling country.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 44×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Black-shale, siltstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Gravel. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit 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 Cienegas Terrace reaches the Gulf of America by way of Cienegas Creek and the Rio Grande: about 560 river miles.
Lake on the way: Paz Ramirez Lake.
270 miles of the trip are on the Rio Grande.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cienegas Terrace; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cienegas Terrace has a hot semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 101° in August; winter nights fall to about 44° in January. About 20 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Cienegas Terrace normally reaches 75° and falls to 53°. The record high is 90°, in 1921; the record low 25°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 1.65 in, fell in 2004.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1905 from the Del Rio Area threaded record (Del Rio International Airport, here). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
