The Melvin 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.
Mostly cloudy
Showers likely
Mostly cloudy; cooler
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
89° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1923. Next is 88° in 1980.
Melvin’s center stands about 1,840 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,790 ft to 1,970 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country.
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 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.
Limestone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 113 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Siltstone-mudstone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, claystone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 Melvin reaches the Gulf of America by way of Brady Creek, the San Saba and the Colorado: about 570 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 Melvin; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Melvin has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in August; winter nights fall to about 31° in January. About 26 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Melvin normally reaches 67° and falls to 41°. The record high is 85°, in 1955; the record low 16°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 2.57 in, fell in 2004.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1923 at Eden, 16 miles west, 210 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
