The Fair Oaks 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.
Mostly sunny
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Partly cloudy
26° on Nov. 17, 1961, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1856. Next is 27° in 1958.
Fair Oaks’s center stands about 190 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 60 ft to 270 ft, a difference of 210 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Flagstaff Hill, about 1,400 ft, 13 miles northeast.
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 20×. 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 10 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic. Age: Jurassic, 145 to 202 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Slate, graywacke. Age: Triassic to Late Jurassic, 145 to 252 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 Fair Oaks reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of the Sacramento: about 80 river miles.
55 miles of the trip are on the Sacramento.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Fair Oaks; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Fair Oaks has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 38° in December. About 18 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Fair Oaks normally reaches 66° and falls to 43°. The record high is 81°, in 2010; the record low 27°, in 1978. The most rain on this date, 0.88 in, fell in 1963.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1856 from the Sacramento Area threaded record (Sacramento Airport Asos, 15 miles southwest, 170 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
