The Tornillo 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
Mostly sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
86° on Nov. 14, 2017, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1946. Next is 85° in 2025.
Tornillo’s center stands about 3,590 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,580 ft to 3,860 ft, a difference of 280 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (fine-detrital, coarse-detrital), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 22×. 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: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, sand. Age: Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 5.3 million years old. About 1 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 Tornillo reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Rio Grande: about 1,210 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Paz Ramirez Lake and Amistad Reservoir.
600 miles of the trip are on the Rio Grande.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Tornillo; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Tornillo has a cold desert climate. Summer afternoons average 98° in June; winter nights fall to about 29° in January. About 8 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Tornillo normally reaches 70° and falls to 36°. The record high is 86°, in 2017; the record low 19°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.59 in, fell in 2004.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1946 at Tornillo 2 SSE, 4 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
