The Dallas 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
Sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy; cooler
Showers likely
81° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1906. Next is 80° in 1953.
Dallas’s center stands about 2,220 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,050 ft to 2,240 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pierre Shale (shale, bentonite), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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 32×. 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, bentonite. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Sandstone, limestone, siltstone. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, clay. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 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 Dallas reaches the Gulf of America by way of Bull Creek, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,190 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Francis Case and Lewis and Clark Lake.
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 Dallas; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Dallas has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 10° in January. A normal year brings about 45 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 27 inches of water.
On November 14 Dallas normally reaches 48° and falls to 23°. The record high is 80°, in 1990; the record low −24°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.26 in, fell in 2014.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1906 at Gregory, 4 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
