The Grand Terrace 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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23° on Nov. 11, 1950, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 25° in 1958.
Grand Terrace’s center stands about 1,070 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 840 ft to 2,080 ft, a difference of 1,240 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Strawberry Peak, about 6,140 ft, 15 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Older Quaternary alluvium and marine deposits (coarse-detrital), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 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.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 0.5 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Miocene, 5.3 to 2,500 million years old. About 0.4 mi of the line.
Tonalite. Age: Middle Jurassic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 175 million years old. About 0.3 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 Grand Terrace reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Santa Ana: about 55 river miles.
Often dry. About 40% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Grand Terrace; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Grand Terrace has a hot semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in August; winter nights fall to about 43° in December. About 9 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Grand Terrace normally reaches 75° and falls to 48°. The record high is 95°, in 1906; the record low 27°, in 1915. The most rain on this date, 0.54 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the Riverside Area threaded record (Riverside Municipal Airport, 9 miles southwest, 220 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
