The Desert Palms 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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25° on Nov. 11, 1950, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is 25° in 1958.
Desert Palms’s center stands about 120 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 40 ft to 690 ft, a difference of 650 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Keys View, about 5,300 ft, 12 miles north-northeast.
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 5×. 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 12 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Miocene, 5.3 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 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 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.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 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.
Desert Palms has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 106° in July; winter nights fall to about 45° in December. About 3 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Desert Palms normally reaches 79° and falls to 53°. The record high is 95°, in 1967; the record low 32°, in 1932. The most rain on this date, 0.25 in, fell in 1918.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 at Indio Fire Station, 7 miles southeast, 140 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
