The Desert Center 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.
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
90° on Nov. 11, 1973, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1933. Next is 88° in 1934.
Desert Center’s center stands about 910 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 650 ft to 1,950 ft, a difference of 1,300 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Black Butte, about 4,470 ft, 11 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 9 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.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Miocene, 5.3 to 2,500 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Miocene, 5.3 to 2,500 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Plutonic. Age: Jurassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 202 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. 3 smaller units 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.
Rain that falls on Desert Center runs straight into the desert basins of the Mojave. The desert basins of the Mojave has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Desert Center; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Desert Center has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 104° in July; winter nights fall to about 46° in January. About 4 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Desert Center normally reaches 74° and falls to 54°. The record high is 87°, in 1995; the record low 40°, in 2000. The most rain on this date, 0.10 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1933 at Eagle Mountain, 7 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
