The Hester 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
Chance of showers
Chance of showers
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
12.31 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1893. The next wettest, 5.12 inches, fell in 1947.
Hester’s center stands about 9 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 100 ft, a difference of 100 ft: gently rolling country. Open water lies within three miles.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Natural Levees (silt, 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.
Silt, clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 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 Hester reaches Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of America by way of the Blind and the Amite: about 45 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Maurepas.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Hester; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Hester has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 42° in January. About 63 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Hester normally reaches 71° and falls to 49°. The record high is 87°, in 1955; the record low 25°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 12.1 in, fell in 1961.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Donaldsonville 4 SW, 16 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
