The Crystal City 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
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly cloudy; cooler
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
24° on Nov. 14, 2018, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1912. Next is 27° in 2011.
Crystal City’s center stands about 560 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 540 ft to 610 ft, a difference of 70 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 4 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 13 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Siltstone. Age: Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 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 Crystal City reaches Corpus Christi Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Turkey Creek, Soldier Slough and the Nueces: about 280 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 Crystal City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Crystal City 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 Crystal City 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, 13 miles south-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
