The Panhandle 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
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
85° on Nov. 16, 2021, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1892. Next is 85° in 2025.
Panhandle’s center stands about 3,460 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,410 ft to 3,480 ft, a difference of 70 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 24 mi of the line.
Clay, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 Panhandle reaches the Gulf of America by way of McClellan Creek, the North Fork Red, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 1,400 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Altus.
960 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Panhandle; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Panhandle has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 25° in January. A normal year brings about 17 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 20 inches of water.
On November 14 Panhandle normally reaches 62° and falls to 34°. The record high is 85°, in 2025; the record low 5°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.09 in, fell in 1924.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 from the Amarillo Area threaded record (Amarillo Airport, 21 miles west-southwest, 150 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
