The Wortham 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
Sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
4.13 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1963. The next wettest, 2.26 inches, fell in 2004.
Wortham’s center stands about 480 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 390 ft to 520 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Tehuacana Hills, about 650 ft, 7 miles west-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Wills Point Formation (clay), from the Paleocene, 56 to 66 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 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. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.4 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Late Paleocene to Early Eocene, 48 to 59 million years old. About 0.3 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 Wortham reaches Galveston Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Cedar Creek, Tehuacana Creek and the Trinity: about 340 river miles.
Lake on the way: Woodlands Golf Course Lake.
120 miles of the trip are on the Trinity.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Wortham; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Wortham has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 96° in August; winter nights fall to about 35° in January. About 40 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Wortham normally reaches 68° and falls to 45°. The record high is 88°, in 2005; the record low 24°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.34 in, fell in 1970.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1963 at Navarro Mills Dam, 18 miles northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
