The Austin 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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14° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1918. Next is 18° in 1986.
Austin’s center stands about 260 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 230 ft to 430 ft, a difference of 200 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Billy Goat Hill, about 660 ft, 15 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (coarse-detrital, fine-detrital), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 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 57×. 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, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sand, fine-detrital. Age: Early Eocene, 48 to 56 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Clay, marl. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 Austin reaches the Gulf of America by way of Cypress Bayou, the Bayou Des Arc, the White River and the Mississippi: about 810 river miles.
620 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Austin; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Austin has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 53 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Austin normally reaches 64° and falls to 38°. The record high is 82°, in 1999; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 3.88 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1918 at Cabot, 5 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
