The Casa Grande 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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96° on Nov. 11, 1967, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1898. Next is 95° in 1999.
Casa Grande’s center stands about 1,400 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,360 ft to 1,430 ft, a difference of 70 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Sacaton Peak, about 2,700 ft, 10 miles north-northeast.
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 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 25×. 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 17 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Holocene, less than 10,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Granite, granodiorite, diorite. Age: Late Cretaceous to Early Eocene, 50 to 82 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Basalt, andesite, dacite. Age: Middle Eocene to Late Miocene, 11 to 38 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 Casa Grande reaches the Gulf of California by way of North Branch Santa Cruz Wash, Santa Rosa Wash, the Gila and the Colorado: about 380 river miles.
220 miles of the trip are on the Gila.
Often dry. About 70% 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 Casa Grande; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Casa Grande has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 107° in July; winter nights fall to about 38° in December. About 8 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Casa Grande normally reaches 78° and falls to 46°. The record high is 93°, in 1953; the record low 26°, in 1929. The most rain on this date, 0.78 in, fell in 1968.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1898 at Casa Grande, 3 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
