The East Columbia 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
Showers likely
Showers likely; cooler
Mostly sunny
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
89° on Nov. 17, 2011, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1931. Next is 89° in 2015.
East Columbia’s center stands about 30 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 10 ft to 70 ft, a difference of 60 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (fine-detrital, coarse-detrital), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 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.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 23 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.4 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 East Columbia reaches the Gulf of America by way of Dry Bayou and the Brazos: about 35 river miles.
Often dry. About 50% 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 East Columbia; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
East Columbia has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 46° in January. About 50 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 East Columbia normally reaches 74° and falls to 55°. The record high is 85°, in 1978; the record low 33°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 1.43 in, fell in 2022.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1931 at Freeport 2 NW, 18 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
