The Willcox 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
Sunny
Showers likely
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
89° on Nov. 14, 2017, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1898. Next is 87° in 1973.
Willcox’s center stands about 4,170 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,150 ft to 4,190 ft, a difference of 40 ft: nearly flat ground. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Dos Cabezas Peaks, about 8,170 ft, 13 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 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 10×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Silt, clay. Age: Holocene, less than 10,000 years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary, metavolcanic, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1.4 to 1.4 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Rhyolite, dacite, andesite. Age: Late Cretaceous to Early Eocene, 50 to 82 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Basalt, andesite, dacite. Age: Middle Eocene to Late Miocene, 11 to 38 million years old. About 0.4 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.
Willcox has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 97° in June; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 12 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Willcox normally reaches 71° and falls to 35°. The record high is 89°, in 2017; the record low 19°, in 1921. The most rain on this date, 0.66 in, fell in 1968.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1898 at Willcox, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
