The Bristol 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
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
20° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is 22° in 2014.
Bristol’s center stands about 510 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 330 ft to 510 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Wolfe City Formation (sandstone-mudstone), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 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.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sandstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Marlstone, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 0.2 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 Bristol reaches Galveston Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Smith Creek and the Trinity: about 400 river miles.
Lake on the way: Woodlands Golf Course Lake.
200 miles of the trip are on the Trinity.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bristol; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bristol has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 97° in August; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. About 41 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Bristol normally reaches 68° and falls to 45°. The record high is 89°, in 1989; the record low 25°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 1.32 in, fell in 1994.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1940 at Ferris, 7 miles northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
