The Laton 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.
Mostly sunny
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Chance of showers; cooler
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84° on Nov. 11, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1899. Next is 83° in 1904.
Laton’s center stands about 260 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 240 ft to 280 ft, a difference of 40 ft: nearly flat ground.
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.
Laton straddles the rim of a basin with no outlet. Rain on the south side runs to the Tulare Lake basin; most of the rest goes to San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean.
From the center of town, a raindrop reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of the San Joaquin and New York Slough: about 260 river miles. One that lands on the south side reaches the Tulare Lake basin by way of the North Fork Kings: about 50 river miles. The Tulare Lake basin has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
200 miles of the trip are on the San Joaquin.
Often dry. About 30% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Laton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Laton has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 98° in July; winter nights fall to about 35° in December. About 8 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Laton normally reaches 67° and falls to 40°. The record high is 80°, in 1939; the record low 21°, in 1938. The most rain on this date, 0.79 in, fell in 2025.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1899 from the Hanford Area threaded record (Hanford Municipal Airport, 9 miles south-southeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
