The Desert Shores 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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96° on Nov. 12, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1950. Next is 95° in 1995.
Desert Shores’s center stands about 210 ft below sea level. Within three miles the land runs from -230 ft to 1,740 ft, a difference of 1,970 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Rabbit Peak, about 6,640 ft, 12 miles west.
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 4×. 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 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Plutonic, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Tonalite. Age: Middle Jurassic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 175 million years old. About 0.8 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.
Rain that falls on Desert Shores runs straight into Salton Sea. 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 Shores; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Desert Shores has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 107° in July; winter nights fall to about 38° in December. About 3 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Desert Shores normally reaches 79° and falls to 45°. The record high is 93°, in 2008; the record low 25°, in 1994. The most rain on this date, 0.24 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1950 at Desert Resorts Regional Airport, 17 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
