The Carmel-by-the-Sea 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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87° on Nov. 15, 2008, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1906. Next is 83° in 1949.
Carmel-by-the-Sea’s center stands about 210 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 900 ft, a difference of 900 ft: steep hill country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Carmel, about 4,410 ft, 14 miles south-southeast.
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 4 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.
Granodiorite, quartz-monzonite. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Oligocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 34 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Middle Miocene, 12 to 15 million years old. About 0.5 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 Carmel-by-the-Sea reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Carmel: about 1 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Carmel-by-the-Sea; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Carmel-by-the-Sea has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 71° in September; winter nights fall to about 44° in December. About 20 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Carmel-by-the-Sea normally reaches 65° and falls to 48°. The record high is 81°, in 1949; the record low 36°, in 1994. The most rain on this date, 1.48 in, fell in 1953.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1906 at Monterey, 5 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
