The Sweetwater 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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85° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1935. Next is 84° in 1955.
Sweetwater’s center stands about 2,180 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,040 ft to 2,330 ft, a difference of 290 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bench Mountain, about 2,600 ft, 15 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Whitehorse Group, undivided (sandstone, shale), from the Permian, 252 to 299 million years old.
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 33×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 113 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, claystone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.6 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 Sweetwater reaches the Gulf of America by way of Town Creek, Sweetwater Creek, the Clear Fork and the Brazos: about 1,020 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Possum Kingdom Lake and Lake Granbury.
550 miles of the trip are on the Brazos.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Sweetwater; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sweetwater has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in July; winter nights fall to about 31° in January. About 21 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Sweetwater normally reaches 65° and falls to 41°. The record high is 83°, in 1989; the record low 12°, in 1976. The most rain on this date, 0.90 in, fell in 1954.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1935 at Roscoe, 7 miles west-southwest, 200 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
