The Delft Colony 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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84° on Nov. 11, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1899. Next is 83° in 1904.
Delft Colony’s center stands about 310 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 290 ft to 330 ft, a difference of 40 ft: nearly flat ground. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Stokes Mountain, about 2,110 ft, 14 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 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 37×. 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 18 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 million years old. About 0.9 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 Delft Colony reaches the Tulare Lake basin by way of the Tule: about 50 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 80% 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 Delft Colony; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Delft Colony has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 98° in July; winter nights fall to about 35° in December. About 8 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Delft Colony normally reaches 67° and falls to 40°. The record high is 80°, in 1939; the record low 21°, in 1938. The most rain on this date, 0.79 in, fell in 2025.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1899 from the Hanford Area threaded record (Hanford Municipal Airport, 17 miles southwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
