The Palm Springs 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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23° on Nov. 17, 1964, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1922. Next is 31° in 1950.
Palm Springs’s center stands about 490 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 380 ft to 4,330 ft, a difference of 3,950 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is San Jacinto Peak, about 10,740 ft, 8 miles west.
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 2×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Tonalite. Age: Middle Jurassic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 175 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 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.
A raindrop that lands in Palm Springs reaches Salton Sea by way of Tahquitz Creek and the Whitewater: about 40 river miles. 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 Palm Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Palm Springs 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 Springs 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, 2 miles east). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
