The Carrizo Hill 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.
Partly cloudy
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Mostly cloudy; cooler
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24° on Nov. 14, 2018, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1912. Next is 27° in 2011.
Carrizo Hill’s center stands about 630 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 530 ft to 650 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Bigford Formation (siltstone), from the Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 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 60×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Siltstone. Age: Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gravel. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old. About 0.3 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 Carrizo Hill reaches Corpus Christi Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Carrizo Creek, Soldier Slough and the Nueces: about 270 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Corpus Christi.
190 miles of the trip are on the Nueces.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Carrizo Hill; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Carrizo Hill has a hot semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 100° in August; winter nights fall to about 38° in January. About 20 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Carrizo Hill normally reaches 75° and falls to 48°. The record high is 93°, in 1951; the record low 24°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 1.18 in, fell in 1998.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1912 at Carrizo Springs 3 S, 3 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
