The Palo Alto 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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81° on Nov. 15, 2008, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1945. Next is 81° in 2010.
Palo Alto’s center stands about 170 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 20 ft to 830 ft, a difference of 810 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Bielawski, about 3,280 ft, 12 miles south-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Franciscan Complex, unit 1 (Coast Ranges) (sandstone, mudstone), from the Jurassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 202 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 7×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Oligocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 34 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Greenstone. Age: Jurassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 202 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Jurassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 202 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 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 Palo Alto reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Barron Creek and Adobe Creek: about 5 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Palo Alto; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Palo Alto has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 78° in September; winter nights fall to about 42° in January. About 13 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Palo Alto normally reaches 66° and falls to 46°. The record high is 80°, in 2010; the record low 36°, in 2000. The most rain on this date, 1.16 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1945 at Moffett Federal Airfield, 5 miles east, 130 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
