The Litchfield Park 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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95° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1964. Next is 92° in 1967.
Litchfield Park’s center stands about 1,030 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 970 ft to 1,100 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Barry Goldwater Peak, about 4,020 ft, 14 miles west-northwest.
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 9×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Gravel, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 0.8 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Silt, clay. Age: Holocene, less than 10,000 years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Late Cretaceous to Early Eocene, 50 to 80 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Holocene, less than 10,000 years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Granite, granodiorite, tonalite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion 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 Litchfield Park reaches the Gulf of California by way of the Hassayampa, the Gila and the Colorado: about 330 river miles.
170 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 Litchfield Park; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Litchfield Park has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 105° in July; winter nights fall to about 40° in December. About 8 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Litchfield Park normally reaches 75° and falls to 48°. The record high is 94°, in 1999; the record low 38°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 0.99 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1964 at Youngtown, 8 miles north-northeast, 100 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
