The Morton 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.
Showers likely
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
5° on Nov. 14, 1976, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1935. Next is 12° in 2014.
Morton’s center stands about 3,770 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,730 ft to 3,820 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country.
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.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 24 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 Morton reaches the Gulf of America by way of the North Fork Double Mountain Fork Brazos, the Double Mountain Fork Brazos and the Brazos: about 1,220 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Possum Kingdom Lake and Lake Granbury.
550 miles of the trip are on the Brazos.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Morton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Morton has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. A normal year brings about 6 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 18 inches of water.
On November 14 Morton normally reaches 64° and falls to 33°. The record high is 85°, in 1973; the record low 5°, in 1976. The most rain on this date, 1.16 in, fell in 1961.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1935 at Morton, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
