The Rio Verde 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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35° on Nov. 16, 2000, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1979. Next is 36° in 1987.
Rio Verde’s center stands about 1,610 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,460 ft to 1,990 ft, a difference of 530 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mine Mountain, about 5,120 ft, 15 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Holocene surficial deposits (silt, clay), from the Holocene, less than 10,000 years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 7×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1.4 to 1.4 billion years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary, schist. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Silt, clay. Age: Holocene, less than 10,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Early Miocene to Late Miocene, 8 to 16 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 0.8 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. 1 smaller unit 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 Rio Verde reaches the Gulf of California by way of the Verde, the Salt River, the Gila and the Colorado: about 390 river miles.
200 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 Rio Verde; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Rio Verde has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 103° in July; winter nights fall to about 44° in December. About 10 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Rio Verde normally reaches 74° and falls to 52°. The record high is 89°, in 1999; the record low 37°, in 1979. The most rain on this date, 0.10 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1979 at Fountain Hills, 9 miles south-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
