The Santa Cruz 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. 15, 2008, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1937. Next is 89° in 2019.
Santa Cruz’s center stands about 90 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 1,010 ft, a difference of 1,010 ft: steep hill country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Loma Prieta, about 3,780 ft, 14 miles northeast.
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 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 11×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granodiorite, quartz-monzonite. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Oligocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 34 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Schist, quartzite. Age: Paleozoic to Mesozoic, 66 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 0.8 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.
Rain that falls on Santa Cruz runs straight into the Pacific Ocean.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Santa Cruz; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Santa Cruz has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in August; winter nights fall to about 37° in January. About 50 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Santa Cruz normally reaches 72° and falls to 40°. The record high is 88°, in 2021; the record low 27°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 3.42 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1937 at Ben Lomond No. 4, 8 miles north-northwest, 340 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
