The Riverdale 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.
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers; cooler
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Mostly sunny
86° on Nov. 11, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1961. Next is 84° in 1995.
Riverdale’s center stands about 210 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 200 ft to 230 ft, a difference of 30 ft: nearly flat ground.
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.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. 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 24 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.
Riverdale straddles the rim of a basin with no outlet. Rain on the south side runs to the Tulare Lake basin; most of the rest goes to San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean.
From the center of town, a raindrop reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of the San Joaquin and New York Slough: about 250 river miles. One that lands on the south side reaches the Tulare Lake basin by way of the North Fork Kings: about 35 river miles. The Tulare Lake basin has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
200 miles of the trip are on the San Joaquin.
Often dry. About 30% 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 Riverdale; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Riverdale has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 98° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in December. About 7 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Riverdale normally reaches 67° and falls to 40°. The record high is 84°, in 1995; the record low 29°, in 2022. The most rain on this date, 1.08 in, fell in 2025.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1961 at Lemoore Reeves Nas, 8 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
