The Rutherford 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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84° on Nov. 15, 2005, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 82° in 1906.
Rutherford’s center stands about 180 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 120 ft to 2,010 ft, a difference of 1,890 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Sugarloaf Mountain, about 2,930 ft, 14 miles north-northwest.
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 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.
Dacite. Age: Late Miocene to Late Pliocene, 3 to 7 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Melange. Age: Jurassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 202 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Serpentinite. Age: Middle Jurassic to Late Jurassic, 145 to 175 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Siltstone-mudstone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 113 to 145 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 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 Rutherford reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Bale Slough and the Napa: about 35 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Rutherford; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Rutherford has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 38° in January. About 28 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Rutherford normally reaches 66° and falls to 42°. The record high is 82°, in 2010; the record low 22°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 2.05 in, fell in 1953.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Sonoma, 11 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
