The Gonzales 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.
Sunny
Chance of showers
Chance of showers
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
6.60 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1937. The next wettest, 4.80 inches, fell in 1961.
Gonzales’s center stands about 14 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 10 ft to 70 ft, a difference of 60 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (clay), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 years old.
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, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Silt, clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 6 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 Gonzales reaches Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of America by way of Boyle Bayou, the Bayou Francois, the Petite Amite, the Blind and the Amite: about 50 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Maurepas.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Gonzales; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Gonzales has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 43° in January. About 62 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Gonzales normally reaches 71° and falls to 50°. The record high is 84°, in 1993; the record low 32°, in 1975. The most rain on this date, 2.25 in, fell in 1989.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1937 at Carville 2 SW, 13 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
