The Burbank 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.
95° on Nov. 13, 2013, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1939. Next is 94° in 2021.
Burbank’s center stands about 630 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 460 ft to 2,790 ft, a difference of 2,330 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is San Gabriel Peak, about 6,120 ft, 13 miles east-northeast.
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.
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 4×. 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 11 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Miocene, 5.3 to 2,500 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Oligocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 34 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Anorthosite, gabbro. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1.2 to 1.2 billion years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Plutonic, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 million years old. About 0.7 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 Burbank reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Burbank Western Channel and the Los Angeles: about 35 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Burbank; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Burbank has a hot semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in August; winter nights fall to about 44° in December. About 14 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Burbank normally reaches 73° and falls to 49°. The record high is 93°, in 2021; the record low 35°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 1.04 in, fell in 1953.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1939 from the Burbank Glendale Pasadena Area threaded record (Burbank Glendale Pasadena Airport, 3 miles west-northwest, 100 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.