The Watson 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
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Mostly sunny; warmer
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22° on Nov. 15, 1940, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1892. Next is 24° in 1908.
Watson’s center stands about 80 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 40 ft to 120 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Prairie Terraces (clay, silt, sand), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 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, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 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 Watson reaches Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of America by way of the Amite: about 85 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Maurepas.
65 miles of the trip are on the Amite.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Watson; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Watson has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 42° in January. About 62 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Watson normally reaches 71° and falls to 48°. The record high is 85°, in 1951; the record low 26°, in 1907. The most rain on this date, 2.00 in, fell in 1909.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 from the Baton Rouge Area threaded record (Baton Rouge Metro Airport, 12 miles west-southwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
