The Dobbins 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.
Partly cloudy
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Showers likely; cooler
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79° on Nov. 13, 1990, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1966. Next is 79° in 2008.
Dobbins’s center stands about 1,750 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 780 ft to 3,250 ft, a difference of 2,470 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Alaska Peak, about 4,050 ft, 12 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Mesozoic gabbroic rocks, unit 2 (undivided) (diorite, gabbro), from the Triassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 252 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 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.
Mafic-volcanic. Age: Jurassic, 145 to 202 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Diorite, gabbro. Age: Triassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 252 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Peridotite, serpentinite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Jurassic, 175 to 1,000 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.
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 Dobbins reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of the Yuba, the Feather and the Sacramento: about 140 river miles.
75 miles of the trip are on the Sacramento.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Dobbins; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Dobbins has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 32° in December. A normal year brings about 9 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 53 inches of water.
On November 14 Dobbins normally reaches 60° and falls to 37°. The record high is 78°, in 1974; the record low 25°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 2.86 in, fell in 1981.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1966 at Grass Valley No. 2, 14 miles south-southeast, 650 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
