The Port Arthur 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.
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
Showers likely
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
88° on Nov. 16, 2011, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1901. Next is 87° in 1902.
Port Arthur’s center stands barely above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 20 ft, a difference of 20 ft: nearly flat ground. Open water lies within three miles.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Beaumont Formation, areas predominantly clay (clay, silt), from the Pleistocene, 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.
Clay, silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 1 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 Port Arthur reaches the Gulf of America by way of Sabine Lake: about 25 river miles.
Lake on the way: Sabine Lake.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Port Arthur; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Port Arthur has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 44° in January. About 62 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Port Arthur normally reaches 73° and falls to 52°. The record high is 86°, in 1978; the record low 26°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.54 in, fell in 1998.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1901 from the Beaumont-Port Arthur Area threaded record (Port Arthur Se Tx Regional Airport, 7 miles west-northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
