The Houston Lake 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
Partly cloudy; warmer
Sunny
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
3° on Nov. 13, 1986, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1888. Next is 6° in 1911.
Houston Lake’s center stands about 830 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 730 ft to 1,020 ft, a difference of 290 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Kansas City Group (limestone, shale), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 53×. 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, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.7 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 Houston Lake reaches the Gulf of America by way of Jumping Branch, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,530 river miles.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Houston Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Houston Lake has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 18 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 39 inches of water.
On November 14 Houston Lake normally reaches 54° and falls to 34°. The record high is 81°, in 1964; the record low 10°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 2.80 in, fell in 1931.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1888 from the Kansas City Area threaded record (Kansas City International Airport, 9 miles northwest, 180 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
