The Pettus 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
Chance of showers; cooler
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
3.97 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1894. The next wettest, 3.62 inches, fell in 1934.
Pettus’s center stands about 300 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 290 ft to 430 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Fleming Formation (clay, sandstone), from the Miocene, 5.3 to 23 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, sandstone. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Clay, sandstone. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.7 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 Pettus reaches the Gulf of America by way of Medio Creek and the Mission: about 85 river miles.
60 miles of the trip are on Medio Creek.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Pettus; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Pettus has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 96° in August; winter nights fall to about 43° in January. About 32 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Pettus normally reaches 75° and falls to 53°. The record high is 89°, in 2005; the record low 28°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 2.80 in, fell in 1998.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 at Beeville 5 NE, 13 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
