The Friant 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
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers; cooler
Sunny
Showers likely
Showers likely
Mostly sunny
21° on Nov. 16, 1958, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1912. Next is 23° in 2004.
Friant’s center stands about 410 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 290 ft to 830 ft, a difference of 540 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Black Mountain, about 3,570 ft, 14 miles east.
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 9×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Plutonic, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to 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 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 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. 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.
A raindrop that lands in Friant reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of the San Joaquin and New York Slough: about 260 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Friant; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Friant has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 99° in July; winter nights fall to about 37° in December. About 15 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Friant normally reaches 67° and falls to 43°. The record high is 84°, in 1990; the record low 27°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 1.54 in, fell in 1953.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1912 at Friant Government Camp, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
