The Joshua 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; cooler
Chance of showers
Sunny; warmer
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
20° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1985. Next is 21° in 1986.
Joshua’s center stands about 920 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 790 ft to 970 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Woodbine Formation (sandstone-mudstone), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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 56×. 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-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Marlstone, limestone. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 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 Joshua reaches Galveston Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Village Creek, the West Fork Trinity and the Trinity: about 510 river miles.
Lake on the way: Woodlands Golf Course Lake.
270 miles of the trip are on the Trinity.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Joshua; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Joshua has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in July; winter nights fall to about 33° in January. About 36 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Joshua normally reaches 67° and falls to 44°. The record high is 89°, in 1989; the record low 23°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.70 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1985 at Burleson, 4 miles northeast, 160 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
