The Parker 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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92° on Nov. 11, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1934. Next is 90° in 1934.
Parker’s center stands about 730 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 470 ft to 960 ft, a difference of 490 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Giers Mountain, about 1,830 ft, 15 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pliocene to middle Miocene deposits (conglomerate, sandstone), from the Early Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 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 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 11 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Holocene, less than 10,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Middle Miocene, 15 to 1,800 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 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.
Parker has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 108° in July; winter nights fall to about 43° in January. About 6 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Parker normally reaches 76° and falls to 52°. The record high is 89°, in 1990; the record low 38°, in 2012. The most rain on this date, 0.13 in, fell in 1978.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1934 at Parker Reservoir, 18 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
