The Ponder 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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90° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1996. Next is 86° in 1999.
Ponder’s center stands about 730 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 650 ft to 810 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Fort Worth Limestone and Duck Creek Formation, undivided, from the Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 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 55×. 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 15 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Marlstone, limestone. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 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 Ponder reaches Galveston Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Hog Branch, Denton Creek, the Elm Fork Trinity and the Trinity: about 520 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Woodlands Golf Course Lake and Grapevine 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 Ponder; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ponder has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 96° in July; winter nights fall to about 32° in January. About 36 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Ponder normally reaches 67° and falls to 43°. The record high is 86°, in 1999; the record low 21°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.38 in, fell in 2022.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Denton Municpal Airport, 5 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
