The Cottonwood 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. 13, 1995, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 87° in 1933.
Cottonwood’s center stands about 440 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 380 ft to 670 ft, a difference of 290 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Soap Butte, about 1,820 ft, 15 miles east.
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 24×. 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, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Andesite, basalt. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Andesite. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 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.
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 Cottonwood reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Cottonwood Creek and the Sacramento: about 280 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cottonwood; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cottonwood has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 100° in July; winter nights fall to about 37° in December. About 34 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Cottonwood normally reaches 65° and falls to 42°. The record high is 87°, in 1933; the record low 23°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 2.32 in, fell in 1934.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the Redding Area threaded record (Redding Airport, 9 miles north). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
