The Porter Heights 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
Sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
7.21 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1888. The next wettest, 6.69 inches, fell in 1998.
Porter Heights’s center stands about 130 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 80 ft to 170 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Lissie Formation (silt, sand, clay), 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.
Silt, sand, clay. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pliocene, 2.6 to 5.3 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.4 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 Porter Heights reaches Galveston Bay and the Gulf of America by way of the West Fork San Jacinto, the San Jacinto and Buffalo Bayou: about 50 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Houston.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Porter Heights; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Porter Heights has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in July; winter nights fall to about 44° in January. About 52 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Porter Heights normally reaches 73° and falls to 52°. The record high is 89°, in 1921; the record low 28°, in 1969. The most rain on this date, 1.40 in, fell in 1998.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1888 from the Houston Area threaded record (Houston Intercontinental Airport, 12 miles south). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
