The Santa Cruz 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.
Partly cloudy
Sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Showers likely; cooler
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
93° on Nov. 12, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1895. Next is 92° in 1967.
Santa Cruz’s center stands about 1,040 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,020 ft to 3,560 ft, a difference of 2,540 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Montezuma Peak, about 4,200 ft, 4 miles south-southwest.
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 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 6×. 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, gravel. Age: Holocene, less than 10,000 years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary, metavolcanic, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 0.8 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granite, granodiorite, tonalite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary, schist. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion 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 Santa Cruz reaches the Gulf of California by way of the Gila and the Colorado: about 340 river miles.
220 miles of the trip are on the Gila.
Often dry. About 60% 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 Santa Cruz; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Santa Cruz has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 107° in July; winter nights fall to about 45° in December. About 7 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Santa Cruz normally reaches 77° and falls to 54°. The record high is 91°, in 1999; the record low 28°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.58 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1895 from the Phoenix Area threaded record (Phoenix Airport, 17 miles northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
