The Holtville 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.
31° on Nov. 16, 1964, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1925. Next is 32° in 1928.
Holtville’s center stands about 8 ft below sea level. Within three miles the land runs from -70 ft to 20 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country.
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.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. 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 to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 24 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 Holtville reaches Salton Sea by way of the Alamo: about 35 river miles. Salton Sea has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Holtville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Holtville has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 108° in July; winter nights fall to about 41° in December. About 2 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Holtville normally reaches 79° and falls to 49°. The record high is 91°, in 1934; the record low 33°, in 1938. The most rain on this date, 0.76 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1925 from the El Centro Area threaded record (Imperial County Airport, 12 miles west). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.