The Petrolia 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
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Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
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92° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1897. Next is 87° in 2021.
Petrolia’s center stands about 1,000 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 900 ft to 1,010 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Petrolia Formation (shale), from the Permian, 252 to 299 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 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.
Shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 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 Petrolia reaches the Gulf of America by way of Long Creek, the Little Wichita, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 1,010 river miles.
830 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Petrolia; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Petrolia has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 97° in July; winter nights fall to about 30° in January. About 28 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Petrolia normally reaches 66° and falls to 41°. The record high is 88°, in 2025; the record low 19°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.92 in, fell in 1947.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1897 from the Wichita Falls Area threaded record (Wichita Falls Municipal Airport, 15 miles west). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
