The Odessa 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.
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy; cooler
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
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Partly cloudy
89° on Nov. 17, 2017, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1930. Next is 86° in 1963.
Odessa’s center stands about 2,900 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,860 ft to 2,960 ft, a difference of 100 ft: gently rolling country.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. 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 22 mi of the line.
Chemical. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 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 Odessa reaches the Gulf of America by way of Beals Creek and the Colorado: about 920 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 Odessa; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Odessa has a hot semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 96° in July; winter nights fall to about 33° in January. About 14 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 4 inches of snow.
On November 14 Odessa normally reaches 67° and falls to 42°. The record high is 86°, in 2025; the record low 13°, in 1976. The most rain on this date, 0.73 in, fell in 2004.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1930 from the Midland-Odessa Area threaded record (Midland International Airport, 12 miles northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
