The Road Runner 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
Showers likely; cooler
Chance of showers; warmer
Sunny
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
17° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1987. Next is 20° in 2014.
Road Runner’s center stands about 670 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 620 ft to 800 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Olive, about 840 ft, 1 miles south-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pawpaw Formation, Weno Limestone, and Denton Clay, undivided (claystone), from the Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 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.
Sandstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Black-shale, siltstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Marlstone, limestone. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 0.5 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 Road Runner reaches Galveston Bay and the Gulf of America by way of the Elm Fork Trinity and the Trinity: about 530 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 Road Runner; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Road Runner has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 32° in January. About 43 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Road Runner normally reaches 64° and falls to 43°. The record high is 84°, in 1999; the record low 21°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.89 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1987 at Gainesville 5 ENE, 11 miles north, 200 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
