The Bisbee 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.
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4.69 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1960. The next wettest, 1.10 inches, fell in 1972.
Bisbee’s center stands about 5,000 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,630 ft to 6,710 ft, a difference of 2,080 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Ballard, about 7,340 ft, 4 miles north-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Quaternary surficial deposits, undivided (sand, silt, clay), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 6×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Arenite, conglomerate. Age: Late Jurassic to Late Cretaceous, 80 to 160 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale, limestone. Age: Early Cambrian to Late Mississippian, 330 to 540 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary, metavolcanic, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale, limestone. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian to Permian, 280 to 310 million years old. About 0.7 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 Bisbee reaches the Gulf of California by way of the San Pedro, the Gila and the Colorado: about 620 river miles.
330 miles of the trip are on the Gila.
Often dry. About 60% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
Seldom reaches the sea. Dams and canals now take nearly all of the Colorado before its old delta in Mexico.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bisbee; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bisbee has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in June; winter nights fall to about 33° in January. About 21 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Bisbee normally reaches 67° and falls to 41°. The record high is 82°, in 2017; the record low 26°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 0.58 in, fell in 2003.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1960 at Coronado National Memorial, 19 miles west, 240 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
