The Palm Desert 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.
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Chance of showers
Mostly sunny
23° on Nov. 17, 1964, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1922. Next is 31° in 1950.
Palm Desert’s center stands about 220 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 130 ft to 1,660 ft, a difference of 1,530 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Toro Peak, about 8,660 ft, 14 miles south-southwest.
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 3×. 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 9 mi of the line.
Tonalite. Age: Middle Jurassic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 175 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 million years old. About 3 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 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.
Palm Desert has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 109° in July; winter nights fall to about 46° in December. About 5 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Palm Desert normally reaches 79° and falls to 54°. The record high is 93°, in 2021; the record low 31°, in 1964. The most rain on this date, 0.50 in, fell in 1946.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1922 from the Palm Springs Area threaded record (Palm Springs, 11 miles northwest, 200 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
