The Minkler 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
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers; cooler
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Showers likely
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Mostly sunny
84° on Nov. 11, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1881. Next is 83° in 1900.
Minkler’s center stands about 400 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 350 ft to 1,640 ft, a difference of 1,290 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bald Mountain, about 3,560 ft, 14 miles east.
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 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 to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Diorite, gabbro. Age: Triassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 252 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Basalt, serpentinite. Age: Ordovician to Permian, 252 to 487 million years old. About 1 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 Minkler reaches the Tulare Lake basin by way of the Kings and the North Fork Kings: about 85 river miles. The Tulare Lake basin has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
A lake that comes back. The bed of Tulare Lake is farmland now; in very wet years it floods again.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Minkler; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Minkler 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 Minkler 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, 15 miles west-northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
