The Lubbock 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
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
90° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1911. Next is 88° in 2017.
Lubbock’s center stands about 3,210 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,140 ft to 3,260 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 47×. 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, less than 2.6 million years old. About 21 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 5.3 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Late Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 12 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Middle Triassic to Late Triassic, 208 to 247 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 Lubbock reaches the Gulf of America by way of the North Fork Double Mountain Fork Brazos, the Double Mountain Fork Brazos and the Brazos: about 1,160 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Possum Kingdom Lake and Lake Granbury.
550 miles of the trip are on the Brazos.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lubbock; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lubbock has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. A normal year brings about 7 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 18 inches of water.
On November 14 Lubbock normally reaches 64° and falls to 37°. The record high is 89°, in 2025; the record low 4°, in 1976. The most rain on this date, 1.57 in, fell in 1968.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1911 from the Lubbock Area threaded record (Lubbock International Airport, 6 miles north-northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
