The Gail 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.
Showers likely
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
88° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1897. Next is 87° in 1969.
Gail’s center stands about 2,550 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,460 ft to 2,830 ft, a difference of 370 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Gail Mountain, about 2,900 ft, 1 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Dockum Group, undivided (shale), from the Middle Triassic to Late Triassic, 208 to 247 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 29×. 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: Middle Triassic to Late Triassic, 208 to 247 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Quaternary, 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.
Limestone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Late Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 12 million years old. About 0.5 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 Gail reaches the Gulf of America by way of Mesquite Creek, Bull Creek and the Colorado: about 870 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Buchanan Lake, Lake Marble Falls, E V Spence Reservoir 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 Gail; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Gail has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 32° in January. About 20 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Gail normally reaches 66° and falls to 41°. The record high is 85°, in 2025; the record low 9°, in 1976. The most rain on this date, 1.90 in, fell in 1954.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1897 at Gail, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
