The North Shore 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.
96° on Nov. 12, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1950. Next is 95° in 1995.
North Shore’s center stands about 80 ft below sea level. Within three miles the land runs from -230 ft to 490 ft, a difference of 720 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Blake Hill, about 1,740 ft, 7 miles north.
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 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 5×. 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 7 mi of the line.
Mica-schist. Age: Late Cretaceous to Eocene, 34 to 100 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Middle Eocene to Early Miocene, 16 to 48 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Plutonic, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 million years old. About 0.5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.5 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.
Rain that falls on North Shore runs straight into Salton Sea. Salton Sea has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of North Shore; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
North Shore has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 107° in July; winter nights fall to about 38° in December. About 3 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 North Shore normally reaches 79° and falls to 45°. The record high is 93°, in 2008; the record low 25°, in 1994. The most rain on this date, 0.24 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1950 at Desert Resorts Regional Airport, 17 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.