The Los Altos 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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81° on Nov. 15, 2008, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1945. Next is 81° in 2010.
Los Altos’s center stands about 160 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 10 ft to 780 ft, a difference of 770 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Bielawski, about 3,280 ft, 11 miles south.
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 5 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, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Jurassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 202 million years old. About 1.0 mi of the line.
Greenstone. Age: Jurassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 202 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.
A raindrop that lands in Los Altos reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Hale Creek and Permanente Creek: about 5 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Los Altos; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Los Altos has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 78° in September; winter nights fall to about 42° in January. About 13 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Los Altos normally reaches 66° and falls to 46°. The record high is 80°, in 2010; the record low 36°, in 2000. The most rain on this date, 1.16 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1945 at Moffett Federal Airfield, 4 miles east-northeast, 120 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
