The Ladera Heights 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.
94° on Nov. 12, 1974, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1944. Next is 93° in 2019.
Ladera Heights’s center stands about 320 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 20 ft to 450 ft, a difference of 430 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is San Vicente Mountain, about 1,900 ft, 12 miles northwest.
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 13×. 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 11 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Oligocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 34 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Plutonic. Age: Jurassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 202 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Basalt, andesite. Age: Late Oligocene to Late Miocene, 8 to 25 million years old. About 1 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 Ladera Heights reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Ballona Creek: about 3 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Ladera Heights; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ladera Heights has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 77° in August; winter nights fall to about 49° in December. About 12 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Ladera Heights normally reaches 71° and falls to 54°. The record high is 90°, in 2013; the record low 43°, in 2000. The most rain on this date, 1.27 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1944 from the Los Angeles Airport Area threaded record (Los Angeles International Airport, 4 miles south-southwest, 220 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.