The Lancaster 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.
Mostly cloudy
Showers likely; cooler
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
20° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is 22° in 2014.
Lancaster’s center stands about 520 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 450 ft to 620 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Inspiration Point, about 870 ft, 14 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Austin Chalk (marlstone, chalk), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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 39×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Marlstone, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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.
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 Lancaster reaches Galveston Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Deep Branch, Tenmile Creek and the Trinity: about 440 river miles.
Lake on the way: Woodlands Golf Course Lake.
230 miles of the trip are on the Trinity.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lancaster; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lancaster has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 97° in August; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. About 41 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Lancaster normally reaches 68° and falls to 45°. The record high is 89°, in 1989; the record low 25°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 1.32 in, fell in 1994.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1940 at Ferris, 7 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
