The Catarina 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.
Catarina’s center stands about 530 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 460 ft to 600 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows El Pico Clay (claystone), from the Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 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.
Claystone. Age: Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 9 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 Catarina reaches Corpus Christi Bay and the Gulf of America by way of San Roque Creek and the Nueces: about 250 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Corpus Christi.
160 miles of the trip are on the Nueces.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Catarina; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Catarina 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 Catarina 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, 18 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
