The San Diego 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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92° on Nov. 12, 2021, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1850. Next is 91° in 1974.
San Diego’s center stands about 80 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 360 ft, a difference of 360 ft: rolling country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is San Miguel Mountain, about 2,540 ft, 13 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Older Quaternary alluvium and marine deposits (coarse-detrital), from the Pleistocene, 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 14×. 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, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Tonalite. Age: Middle Jurassic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 175 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Middle Eocene to Late Eocene, 34 to 48 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Mudstone, sandstone. Age: Paleocene to Oligocene, 23 to 66 million years old. About 0.9 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 San Diego reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the San Diego: about 7 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of San Diego; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
San Diego has a hot semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 77° in August; winter nights fall to about 50° in January. About 10 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 San Diego normally reaches 71° and falls to 55°. The record high is 87°, in 2021; the record low 39°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.12 in, fell in 1944.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1850 from the San Diego Area threaded record (San Diego International Airport, here). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
