The Van Vleck 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; cooler
Mostly sunny
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
89° on Nov. 13, 1969, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1909. Next is 88° in 1916.
Van Vleck’s center stands about 50 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 30 ft to 80 ft, a difference of 50 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Beaumont Formation, areas predominantly clay (clay, silt), 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.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Clay, silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 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 Van Vleck reaches the Gulf of America by way of Hardeman Slough and Caney Creek: about 70 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Van Vleck; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Van Vleck has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in August; winter nights fall to about 43° in January. About 49 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Van Vleck normally reaches 72° and falls to 52°. The record high is 86°, in 1955; the record low 30°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.05 in, fell in 1961.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1909 at Bay City Waterworks, 6 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
