The Ballinger 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; cooler
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
3.59 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1897. The next wettest, 2.00 inches, fell in 1922.
Ballinger’s center stands about 1,650 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,610 ft to 1,740 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Clear Fork Group (claystone), from the Permian, 252 to 299 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 58×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Claystone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Conglomerate. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit 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 Ballinger reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Colorado: about 650 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 Ballinger; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ballinger has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in July; winter nights fall to about 31° in January. About 23 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Ballinger normally reaches 68° and falls to 42°. The record high is 87°, in 1989; the record low 17°, in 1976. The most rain on this date, 0.80 in, fell in 1958.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1897 at Ballinger 2 NW, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
