The Seth Ward 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.
Showers likely
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
86° on Nov. 16, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1908. Next is 85° in 1956.
Seth Ward’s center stands about 3,370 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,350 ft to 3,400 ft, a difference of 50 ft: nearly flat ground.
The section below crosses 2 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.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 23 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Late Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 12 million 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 Seth Ward reaches the Gulf of America by way of the White River, the Salt Fork Brazos and the Brazos: about 1,160 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Possum Kingdom Lake and Lake Granbury.
550 miles of the trip are on the Brazos.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Seth Ward; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Seth Ward has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. A normal year brings about 8 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 19 inches of water.
On November 14 Seth Ward normally reaches 62° and falls to 36°. The record high is 84°, in 2025; the record low 6°, in 1976. The most rain on this date, 0.83 in, fell in 2004.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1908 at Plainview, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
