The Blessing 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.
Showers likely
Showers likely
Showers likely; cooler
Mostly sunny
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
88° on Nov. 16, 2011, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1943. Next is 87° in 2016.
Blessing’s center stands about 40 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 20 ft to 60 ft, a difference of 40 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Beaumont Formation, areas predominantly sand, from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 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.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Clay, silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 11 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 Blessing reaches the Gulf of America by way of Cashs Creek and the Tres Palacios: about 18 river miles.
Often dry. About 30% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Blessing; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Blessing has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in August; winter nights fall to about 46° in January. About 43 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Blessing normally reaches 75° and falls to 55°. The record high is 83°, in 2020; the record low 32°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.82 in, fell in 1954.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1943 at Palacios Municipal Airport, 11 miles south-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
