The Ford City 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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87° on Nov. 11, 1973, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is 86° in 2016.
Ford City’s center stands about 890 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 560 ft to 1,610 ft, a difference of 1,050 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Midway Peak, about 3,640 ft, 9 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 5 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.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Oligocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 34 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Oligocene to Pleistocene, less than 34 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Early Miocene to Middle Miocene, 14 to 18 million years old. About 0.2 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.
Rain that falls on Ford City runs only a short way, about 5 miles, to the Tulare Lake basin. The Tulare Lake basin has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
A lake that comes back. The bed of Tulare Lake is farmland now; in very wet years it floods again.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Ford City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ford City has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 98° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in December. About 6 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Ford City normally reaches 68° and falls to 41°. The record high is 82°, in 1990; the record low 30°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 0.39 in, fell in 1953.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1940 at Buttonwillow, 17 miles north, 660 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
