The Coalinga 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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89° on Nov. 11, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1942. Next is 87° in 1990.
Coalinga’s center stands about 670 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 610 ft to 1,290 ft, a difference of 680 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Castle Mountain, about 4,290 ft, 14 miles south.
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 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.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Jurassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 202 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Oligocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 34 million years old. About 1 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 Coalinga reaches the Tulare Lake basin by way of Los Gatos Creek: about 14 river miles. The Tulare Lake basin has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Often dry. About 100% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
A lake that comes back. The bed of Tulare Lake is farmland now; in very wet years it floods again.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Coalinga; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Coalinga has a hot semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 101° in July; winter nights fall to about 37° in December. About 8 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Coalinga normally reaches 70° and falls to 42°. The record high is 83°, in 1999; the record low 31°, in 2000. The most rain on this date, 1.58 in, fell in 1953.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1942 at Coalinga, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
