The O'Donnell 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 cloudy
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Mostly sunny; warmer
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89° on Nov. 16, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1913. Next is 86° in 2021.
O'Donnell’s center stands about 3,050 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,990 ft to 3,080 ft, a difference of 90 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 40×. 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 13 mi of the line.
Sandstone, limestone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Middle Triassic to Late Triassic, 208 to 247 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Late Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 12 million years old. About 0.4 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 O'Donnell reaches the Gulf of America by way of Tobacco Creek and the Colorado: about 900 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 O'Donnell; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
O'Donnell has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 21 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 5 inches of snow.
On November 14 O'Donnell normally reaches 65° and falls to 38°. The record high is 85°, in 2025; the record low 4°, in 1976. The most rain on this date, 0.60 in, fell in 2004.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1913 at Tahoka, 14 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
