The Agua Dulce 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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88° on Nov. 16, 1992, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1931. Next is 85° in 1995.
Agua Dulce’s center stands about 2,580 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,210 ft to 3,550 ft, a difference of 1,340 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Gleason, about 6,520 ft, 12 miles southeast.
The section below crosses 9 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 5×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Mica-schist. Age: Late Cretaceous to Eocene, 34 to 100 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Anorthosite, gabbro. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1.2 to 1.2 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Middle Eocene to Early Miocene, 16 to 48 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Miocene, 5.3 to 2,500 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 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. 3 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 Agua Dulce reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Santa Clara: about 65 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Agua Dulce; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Agua Dulce has a cold desert climate. Summer afternoons average 98° in August; winter nights fall to about 32° in December. About 6 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Agua Dulce normally reaches 68° and falls to 38°. The record high is 84°, in 1932; the record low 24°, in 1938. The most rain on this date, 0.81 in, fell in 1946.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1931 from the Palmdale Area threaded record (Palmdale Airport, 16 miles east-northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
