The Whitney 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
Chance of showers
Sunny; warmer
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
3.74 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1903. The next wettest, 2.79 inches, fell in 2004.
Whitney’s center stands about 600 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 520 ft to 710 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Grayson Marl and Main Street Limestone, undivided (marlstone, limestone), from the Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 51×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Marlstone, limestone. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Sandstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, marl. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 0.6 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 Whitney reaches the Gulf of America by way of Whitney Creek and the Brazos: about 460 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Whitney; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Whitney has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 97° in August; winter nights fall to about 34° in January. About 39 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Whitney normally reaches 69° and falls to 44°. The record high is 90°, in 1983; the record low 20°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.10 in, fell in 1915.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1903 at Hillsboro, 13 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
