The Mendota 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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Chance of showers; cooler
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84° on Nov. 11, 1956, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1928. Next is 84° in 2016.
Mendota’s center stands about 170 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 150 ft to 190 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.
A raindrop that lands in Mendota reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of the San Joaquin and New York Slough: about 200 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Mendota; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mendota has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 98° in July; winter nights fall to about 38° in December. About 11 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Mendota normally reaches 67° and falls to 42°. The record high is 79°, in 1948; the record low 26°, in 1938. The most rain on this date, 1.27 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1928 from the Madera Area threaded record (Madera Municipal Airport, 22 miles northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
