The Madera Ranchos 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 1881. Next is 83° in 1900.
Madera Ranchos’s center stands about 340 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 300 ft to 380 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Hulbert Mountain, about 1,810 ft, 14 miles northeast.
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 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 32×. 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 13 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Plutonic, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 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.
Madera Ranchos has a hot semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 98° in July; winter nights fall to about 40° in December. About 11 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Madera Ranchos normally reaches 65° and falls to 46°. The record high is 79°, in 1948; the record low 30°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.35 in, fell in 1953.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1881 from the Fresno Area threaded record (Fresno Yosemite Int'L, 13 miles southeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
