The Grand Prairie 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
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Partly cloudy
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89° on Nov. 14, 1989, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1898. Next is 89° in 2025.
Grand Prairie’s center stands about 520 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 420 ft to 580 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Inspiration Point, about 870 ft, 12 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Terrace deposits (sand), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 54×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Marlstone, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Black-shale, siltstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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 Grand Prairie reaches Galveston Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Kirby Creek, Mountain Creek and the Trinity: about 470 river miles.
Lake on the way: Woodlands Golf Course Lake.
270 miles of the trip are on the Trinity.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Grand Prairie; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Grand Prairie has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 96° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. About 37 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Grand Prairie normally reaches 67° and falls to 47°. The record high is 89°, in 1989; the record low 21°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.82 in, fell in 1994.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1898 from the Dallas-Fort Worth Area threaded record (Dal-Ftw Wscmo Airport, 11 miles north). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
