The Jefferson 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; warmer
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
19° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1903. Next is 21° in 1997.
Jefferson’s center stands about 200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 190 ft to 320 ft, a difference of 130 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 6 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.
Sandstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Siltstone, sandstone. Age: Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Mudstone. Age: Late Paleocene to Early Eocene, 48 to 59 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.3 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 Jefferson reaches the Gulf of America by way of Big Cypress Bayou, Twelvemile Bayou, Cross Bayou, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 460 river miles.
Lake on the way: Clear Lake.
260 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Jefferson; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Jefferson has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 34° in January. About 50 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Jefferson normally reaches 67° and falls to 42°. The record high is 82°, in 2007; the record low 19°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.52 in, fell in 1970.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1903 at Jefferson, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
