The Bret Harte 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.
Mostly sunny
Chance of showers
Showers likely; cooler
Sunny
Showers likely
Showers likely
Partly cloudy
80° on Nov. 12, 1989, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1906. Next is 80° in 1995.
Bret Harte’s center stands about 80 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 50 ft to 100 ft, a difference of 50 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Quaternary alluvium and marine deposits (coarse-detrital), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 24 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 Bret Harte reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of the San Joaquin and New York Slough: about 100 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bret Harte; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bret Harte has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in July; winter nights fall to about 39° in January. About 12 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Bret Harte normally reaches 66° and falls to 43°. The record high is 79°, in 1995; the record low 27°, in 1938. The most rain on this date, 0.89 in, fell in 1968.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1906 at Modesto Airport, 3 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
