The El Sobrante 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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89° on Nov. 14, 2010, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1950. Next is 82° in 2025.
El Sobrante’s center stands about 170 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 10 ft to 900 ft, a difference of 890 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Vollmer Peak, about 1,890 ft, 8 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Plio-Pleistocene and Pliocene loosely consolidated deposits (sandstone, conglomerate), from the Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 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 16×. 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, mudstone. Age: Oligocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 34 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Mudstone, sandstone. Age: Paleocene to Oligocene, 23 to 66 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.6 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 El Sobrante reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of San Pablo Creek: about 5 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of El Sobrante; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
El Sobrante has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 75° in September; winter nights fall to about 44° in January. About 24 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 El Sobrante normally reaches 65° and falls to 49°. The record high is 89°, in 2010; the record low 34°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 1.53 in, fell in 1952.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1950 at Richmond, 6 miles southwest, 150 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
