The Watauga 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
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
87° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 86° in 1999.
Watauga’s center stands about 610 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 530 ft to 720 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Blue Mound, about 840 ft, 8 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pawpaw Formation, Weno Limestone, and Denton Clay, undivided (claystone), from the Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 49×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Marlstone, limestone. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 Watauga reaches Galveston Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Big Fossil Creek, the West Fork Trinity and the Trinity: about 490 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 Watauga; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Watauga has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. About 38 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Watauga normally reaches 66° and falls to 46°. The record high is 86°, in 1999; the record low 23°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 1.80 in, fell in 1994.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Fort Worth Wsfo, 3 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
