The Sour Lake 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
27° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1947. Next is 29° in 2018.
Sour Lake’s center stands about 50 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 30 ft to 70 ft, a difference of 40 ft: nearly flat ground.
The section below crosses 3 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 10 mi of the line.
Silt, sand, clay. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 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 Sour Lake reaches the Gulf of America by way of Little Pine Island Bayou, Pine Island Bayou and the Neches: about 90 river miles.
Lake on the way: Sabine Lake.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Sour Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sour Lake has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in August; winter nights fall to about 42° in January. About 62 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Sour Lake normally reaches 72° and falls to 51°. The record high is 89°, in 1955; the record low 29°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.83 in, fell in 1998.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1947 at Beaumont Research Ctr, 8 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
