The Little Elm 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.
Little Elm’s center stands about 540 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 510 ft to 600 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country.
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 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.
Black-shale, siltstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Marlstone, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.7 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 Little Elm reaches Galveston Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Lake Lewisville, the Elm Fork Trinity and the Trinity: about 490 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 Little Elm; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Little Elm 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 Little Elm 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, 19 miles south-southwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
