The Kemah 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; warmer
Showers likely; cooler
Mostly sunny
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
30° on Nov. 15, 2018, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1990. Next is 31° in 2019.
Kemah’s center stands about 8 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 30 ft, a difference of 30 ft: nearly flat ground. Open water lies within three miles.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Beaumont Formation, areas predominantly sand, from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 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.
Clay, silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
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 0.4 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 Kemah reaches Galveston Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Jarbo Bayou and Clear Creek: about 3 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Kemah; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Kemah has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 46° in January. About 60 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Kemah normally reaches 73° and falls to 54°. The record high is 85°, in 2007; the record low 32°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 2.47 in, fell in 1998.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1990 at Houston Nwso, 6 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
