The Roanoke 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.
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89° on Nov. 14, 1989, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1898. Next is 89° in 2025.
Roanoke’s center stands about 640 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 540 ft to 760 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Blue Mound, about 840 ft, 8 miles west-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Grayson Marl and Main Street Limestone, undivided (marlstone, limestone), from the Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 53×. 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 8 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Marlstone, limestone. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 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.
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 Roanoke reaches Galveston Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Cade Branch, Denton Creek, the Elm Fork Trinity and the Trinity: about 500 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 Roanoke; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Roanoke has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 96° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. About 37 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Roanoke normally reaches 67° and falls to 47°. The record high is 89°, in 1989; the record low 21°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.82 in, fell in 1994.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1898 from the Dallas-Fort Worth Area threaded record (Dal-Ftw Wscmo Airport, 14 miles east-southeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
