The Kensington 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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89° on Nov. 14, 2010, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1950. Next is 82° in 2025.
Kensington’s center stands about 350 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 1,310 ft, a difference of 1,310 ft: steep hill country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Vollmer Peak, about 1,890 ft, 4 miles east-southeast.
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 11×. 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 7 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Basalt, basaltic-andesite. Age: Middle Miocene to Late Miocene, 8 to 12 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Jurassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 202 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Oligocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 34 million years old. About 0.3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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 Kensington reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Cerrito Creek: about 1 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Kensington; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Kensington has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 75° in September; winter nights fall to about 44° in January. About 24 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Kensington normally reaches 65° and falls to 49°. The record high is 89°, in 2010; the record low 34°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 1.53 in, fell in 1952.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1950 at Richmond, 5 miles west, 330 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
