The Lake Isabella 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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84° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1951. Next is 82° in 1990.
Lake Isabella’s center stands about 2,500 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,410 ft to 4,880 ft, a difference of 2,470 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Piute Peak, about 8,400 ft, 12 miles south-southeast.
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.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 4×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 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 Lake Isabella reaches the Tulare Lake basin by way of the Kern: about 70 river miles. The Tulare Lake basin has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
A lake that comes back. The bed of Tulare Lake is farmland now; in very wet years it floods again.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lake Isabella; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lake Isabella has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in December. A normal year brings about 6 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 19 inches of water.
On November 14 Lake Isabella normally reaches 63° and falls to 32°. The record high is 83°, in 1999; the record low 16°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 1.48 in, fell in 1952.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1951 at Glennville, 15 miles west-northwest, 640 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
