The Hempstead 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
Chance of showers
Sunny; warmer
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
97° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1897. Next is 94° in 1927.
Hempstead’s center stands about 250 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 190 ft to 270 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Willis Formation (coarse-detrital, fine-detrital), from the Pliocene, 2.6 to 5.3 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.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pliocene, 2.6 to 5.3 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Clay, sandstone. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Silt, sand, clay. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 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 Hempstead reaches the Gulf of America by way of Clear Creek and the Brazos: about 190 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Hempstead; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Hempstead has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in August; winter nights fall to about 39° in January. About 48 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Hempstead normally reaches 70° and falls to 48°. The record high is 91°, in 1921; the record low 26°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.35 in, fell in 1920.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1897 at Brenham, 20 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
