The Matagorda 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
Showers likely; cooler
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
88° on Nov. 16, 2011, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1943. Next is 87° in 2016.
Matagorda’s center stands about 9 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 20 ft, a difference of 20 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 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.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sand, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 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 Matagorda reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Colorado: about 8 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Matagorda; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Matagorda has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in August; winter nights fall to about 46° in January. About 43 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Matagorda normally reaches 75° and falls to 55°. The record high is 83°, in 2020; the record low 32°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.82 in, fell in 1954.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1943 at Palacios Municipal Airport, 18 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
