The Bardwell 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.
Chance of showers
Showers likely; cooler
Chance of showers
Sunny; warmer
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
4.23 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1893. The next wettest, 3.62 inches, fell in 1971.
Bardwell’s center stands about 480 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 400 ft to 500 ft, a difference of 100 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ozan Formation (claystone), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 58×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Claystone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sandstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Marlstone, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1.0 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 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.
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 Bardwell reaches Galveston Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Bardwell Lake, Waxahachie Creek, Chambers Creek, Richland Creek and the Trinity: about 390 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Woodlands Golf Course Lake and Bardwell Lake.
140 miles of the trip are on the Trinity.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bardwell; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bardwell has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 96° in August; winter nights fall to about 35° in January. About 42 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Bardwell normally reaches 68° and falls to 45°. The record high is 88°, in 2005; the record low 23°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.22 in, fell in 1902.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Corsicana, 16 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
