The Poway 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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96° on Nov. 12, 2021, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 94° in 2019.
Poway’s center stands about 520 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 450 ft to 1,400 ft, a difference of 950 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is El Cajon Mountain, about 3,640 ft, 13 miles east-southeast.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 8×. 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 8 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Felsic-volcanic, mafic-volcanic. Age: Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous, 100 to 164 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Mudstone, sandstone. Age: Paleocene to Oligocene, 23 to 66 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Middle Eocene to Late Eocene, 34 to 48 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. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 Poway reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Rattlesnake Creek and Poway Creek: about 19 river miles.
Often dry. About 90% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Poway; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Poway has a hot semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in August; winter nights fall to about 44° in December. About 14 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Poway normally reaches 75° and falls to 50°. The record high is 93°, in 1949; the record low 24°, in 1938. The most rain on this date, 1.47 in, fell in 1950.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the Escondido Area threaded record (Escondido No. 2, 11 miles north-northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
