The Katherine 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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30° on Nov. 16, 2001, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1988. Next is 35° in 2000.
Katherine’s center stands about 700 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 540 ft to 1,450 ft, a difference of 910 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Spirit Mountain, about 5,580 ft, 10 miles west-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Middle Proterozoic granitic rocks (granite), from the Mesoproterozoic, 1.4 to 1.4 billion 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 4×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Basalt, andesite, dacite. Age: Middle Eocene to Late Miocene, 11 to 38 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Age: Eocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 56 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1.4 to 1.4 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, 0.8 to 3 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.8 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 Katherine reaches the Gulf of California by way of Lake Mohave and the Colorado: about 370 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu.
290 miles of the trip are on the Colorado.
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 Katherine; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Katherine has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 110° in July; winter nights fall to about 44° in December. About 5 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Katherine normally reaches 75° and falls to 51°. The record high is 87°, in 2025; the record low 35°, in 2000. The most rain on this date, 0.25 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1988 at Laughlin, 4 miles south-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
