The Mathews 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.
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy; warmer
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
20° on Nov. 16, 1940, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 24° in 1969.
Mathews’s center stands about 10 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 30 ft, a difference of 30 ft: nearly flat ground.
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.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Silt, clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 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 Mathews reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Bayou Lafourche: about 55 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Mathews; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mathews has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 44° in January. About 71 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Mathews normally reaches 73° and falls to 52°. The record high is 88°, in 1909; the record low 27°, in 1907. The most rain on this date, 3.50 in, fell in 1914.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Thibodaux 4 SE, 14 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
