The Gainesville 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
Partly cloudy; warmer
Sunny
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
17° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1987. Next is 20° in 2014.
Gainesville’s center stands about 750 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 690 ft to 850 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pawpaw Formation, Weno Limestone, and Denton Clay, undivided (claystone), from the Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 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 57×. 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. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sandstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Marlstone, limestone. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 0.6 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 Gainesville reaches Galveston Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Pecan Creek, the Elm Fork Trinity and the Trinity: about 540 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Woodlands Golf Course Lake and Lake Lewisville.
270 miles of the trip are on the Trinity.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Gainesville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Gainesville has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 32° in January. About 43 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Gainesville normally reaches 64° and falls to 43°. The record high is 84°, in 1999; the record low 21°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.89 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1987 at Gainesville 5 ENE, 4 miles east-northeast, 120 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
