The San Miguel 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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89° on Nov. 16, 2008, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1952. Next is 86° in 1990.
San Miguel’s center stands about 620 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 580 ft to 1,500 ft, a difference of 920 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Norn Hill, about 1,210 ft, 8 miles south.
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 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 13×. 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, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Oligocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 34 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous to Paleocene, 56 to 100 million years old. About 2 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 San Miguel reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Salinas: about 120 river miles.
Often dry. About 80% 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 San Miguel; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
San Miguel has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in August; winter nights fall to about 33° in December. About 12 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 San Miguel normally reaches 69° and falls to 37°. The record high is 83°, in 2021; the record low 24°, in 1980. The most rain on this date, 2.12 in, fell in 1953.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1952 at Paso Robles Municipal Airport, 7 miles south-southeast, 200 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
