The Long Beach 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.
95° on Nov. 12, 1974, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1958. Next is 95° in 2021.
Long Beach’s center stands about 40 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 200 ft, a difference of 200 ft: gently rolling country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is San Pedro Hill, about 1,480 ft, 9 miles west.
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 44×. 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 12 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, 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 2 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 Long Beach reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Los Angeles: about 4 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Long Beach; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Long Beach has a hot semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in August; winter nights fall to about 46° in December. About 12 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Long Beach normally reaches 73° and falls to 52°. The record high is 91°, in 2007; the record low 39°, in 1964. The most rain on this date, 1.07 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1958 from the Long Beach Area threaded record (Long Beach Daugherty Airport, 4 miles northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.