The Jamaica Beach 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
Storms likely
Showers likely; cooler
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
84° on Nov. 16, 2011, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1871. Next is 84° in 2024.
Jamaica Beach’s center stands barely above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 10 ft, a difference of 10 ft: nearly flat ground. Open water lies within three miles.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Barrier ridge and barrier flat deposts (sand), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 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.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Clay, silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.9 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.
Rain that falls on Jamaica Beach runs straight into the Gulf of America.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Jamaica Beach; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Jamaica Beach has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in August; winter nights fall to about 49° in January. About 47 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Jamaica Beach normally reaches 73° and falls to 59°. The record high is 83°, in 2020; the record low 37°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 1.66 in, fell in 2022.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1871 from the Galveston Area threaded record (Galveston Scholes Field, 9 miles northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
