The Tow 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.
Chance of showers
Showers likely
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
19° on Nov. 14, 2018, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 22° in 1920.
Tow’s center stands about 1,040 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 990 ft to 1,450 ft, a difference of 460 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Indian Hills, about 1,650 ft, 8 miles west-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Hickory Sandstone Member, from the Middle Cambrian, 497 to 521 million years old.
The section below crosses 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 28×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Cambrian to Early Ordovician, 471 to 497 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Proterozoic, 542 to 2,500 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Middle Cambrian, 497 to 521 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 497 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. 2 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Tow reaches the Gulf of America by way of Buchanan Lake and the Colorado: about 420 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Buchanan Lake, Lake Marble Falls 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 Tow; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Tow has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in August; winter nights fall to about 34° in January. About 32 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Tow normally reaches 68° and falls to 45°. The record high is 88°, in 1903; the record low 19°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 1.53 in, fell in 1954.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Burnet, 17 miles east-southeast, 240 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
