The 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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94° on Nov. 12, 1974, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1944. Next is 93° in 2019.
Los Angeles’s center stands about 300 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 200 ft to 650 ft, a difference of 450 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Lowe, about 5,550 ft, 15 miles north-northeast.
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 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 12×. 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 16 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Oligocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 34 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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 Los Angeles reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Ballona Creek: about 4 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Los Angeles; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Los Angeles has a hot semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in August; winter nights fall to about 48° in December. About 14 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Los Angeles normally reaches 73° and falls to 54°. The record high is 93°, in 1933; the record low 36°, in 1880. The most rain on this date, 1.33 in, fell in 1928.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1877 from the Los Angeles Downtown Area threaded record (Los Angeles Downtown, here). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
