The Wharton 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.
Mostly cloudy
Showers likely
Chance of showers; cooler
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
4.50 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1941. The next wettest, 3.16 inches, fell in 1961.
Wharton’s center stands about 100 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 80 ft to 130 ft, a difference of 50 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (fine-detrital, coarse-detrital), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 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 23 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.5 mi of the line.
Clay, silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million 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 Wharton reaches the Gulf of America by way of Baughman Slough, Peach Creek and the San Bernard: about 80 river miles.
65 miles of the trip are on the San Bernard.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Wharton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Wharton has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 96° in August; winter nights fall to about 42° in January. About 50 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Wharton normally reaches 75° and falls to 52°. The record high is 89°, in 2005; the record low 29°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.30 in, fell in 2023.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1941 at El Campo, 13 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
