The Martinez Lake 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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93° on Nov. 12, 1973, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1955. Next is 93° in 1999.
Martinez Lake’s center stands about 190 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 180 ft to 490 ft, a difference of 310 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Picacho Peak, about 1,520 ft, 11 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Holocene river alluvium (sand, gravel), from the Holocene, less than 10,000 years old.
The section below crosses 10 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 15×. 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 8 mi of the line.
Rhyolite, basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Late Miocene, 8 to 28 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Basalt, andesite, dacite. Age: Middle Eocene to Late Miocene, 11 to 38 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Rhyolite, dacite. Age: Late Oligocene to Late Miocene, 8 to 28 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 4 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Martinez Lake reaches the Gulf of California by way of the Colorado: about 150 river miles.
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 Martinez Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Martinez Lake has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 107° in July; winter nights fall to about 43° in December. About 4 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Martinez Lake normally reaches 78° and falls to 52°. The record high is 91°, in 1999; the record low 38°, in 2000. The most rain on this date, 0.81 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1955 at Yuma Proving Ground, 11 miles south-southeast, 130 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
