The Hilltop Lakes 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; cooler
Chance of showers
Sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
3.91 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1937. The next wettest, 2.94 inches, fell in 1987.
Hilltop Lakes’s center stands about 470 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 290 ft to 550 ft, a difference of 260 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Sparta Sand (sandstone), from the Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 59×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Claystone, sandstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.6 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 Hilltop Lakes reaches the Gulf of America by way of Running Creek, the Navasota and the Brazos: about 320 river miles.
230 miles of the trip are on the Brazos.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Hilltop Lakes; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Hilltop Lakes has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in August; winter nights fall to about 35° in January. About 42 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Hilltop Lakes normally reaches 70° and falls to 44°. The record high is 88°, in 1955; the record low 21°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.45 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1937 at Centerville, 18 miles northeast, 150 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
