The Garfield 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
Mostly cloudy; cooler
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
24° on Nov. 14, 2018, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1942. Next is 25° in 2014.
Garfield’s center stands about 490 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 380 ft to 570 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Terrace deposits (sand), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 10 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 54×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Clay, siltstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, carbonate. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Paleocene to Eocene, 34 to 66 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 4 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Garfield reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Colorado: about 270 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Garfield; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Garfield has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 97° in August; winter nights fall to about 38° in January. About 36 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Garfield normally reaches 72° and falls to 47°. The record high is 89°, in 2020; the record low 24°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.87 in, fell in 1998.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1942 at Austin Bergstrom International Airport, 7 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
