The Lake Los Angeles 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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88° on Nov. 16, 1992, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1931. Next is 85° in 1995.
Lake Los Angeles’s center stands about 2,680 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,580 ft to 3,110 ft, a difference of 530 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Devils Chair, about 5,440 ft, 14 miles south.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 10×. 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 19 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 0.7 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.
Rain that falls on Lake Los Angeles runs only a short way, about 2 miles, to the desert basins of Owens Valley and Death Valley. The desert basins of Owens Valley and Death Valley 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 Lake Los Angeles; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lake Los Angeles has a cold desert climate. Summer afternoons average 98° in August; winter nights fall to about 32° in December. About 6 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Lake Los Angeles normally reaches 68° and falls to 38°. The record high is 84°, in 1932; the record low 24°, in 1938. The most rain on this date, 0.81 in, fell in 1946.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1931 from the Palmdale Area threaded record (Palmdale Airport, 14 miles west, 170 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
