The Desert Hot Springs 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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23° on Nov. 17, 1964, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1922. Next is 31° in 1950.
Desert Hot Springs’s center stands about 1,070 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 800 ft to 2,670 ft, a difference of 1,870 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is San Jacinto Peak, about 10,740 ft, 14 miles southwest.
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 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 3×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Miocene, 5.3 to 2,500 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Tonalite. Age: Middle Jurassic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 175 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.7 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 Desert Hot Springs reaches Salton Sea by way of Mission Creek and the Whitewater: about 45 river miles. Salton Sea 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 Hot Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Desert Hot Springs has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 109° in July; winter nights fall to about 46° in December. About 5 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Desert Hot Springs normally reaches 79° and falls to 54°. The record high is 93°, in 2021; the record low 31°, in 1964. The most rain on this date, 0.50 in, fell in 1946.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1922 from the Palm Springs Area threaded record (Palm Springs, 9 miles south, 640 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
