The Dawson 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; cooler
Chance of showers
Sunny; warmer
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
4.13 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1963. The next wettest, 2.26 inches, fell in 2004.
Dawson’s center stands about 490 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 400 ft to 560 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Tehuacana Hills, about 650 ft, 14 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Wolfe City Formation (sandstone-mudstone), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million 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 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 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.
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 Dawson reaches Galveston Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Battle Creek, Richland Creek and the Trinity: about 380 river miles.
Lake on the way: Woodlands Golf Course Lake.
140 miles of the trip are on the Trinity.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Dawson; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Dawson has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 96° in August; winter nights fall to about 35° in January. About 40 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Dawson normally reaches 68° and falls to 45°. The record high is 88°, in 2005; the record low 24°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.34 in, fell in 1970.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1963 at Navarro Mills Dam, 5 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
