The Santa Monica 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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94° on Nov. 12, 1974, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1944. Next is 93° in 2019.
Santa Monica’s center stands about 120 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 530 ft, a difference of 530 ft: hilly country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Saddle Peak, about 2,770 ft, 10 miles west-northwest.
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 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 12×. 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.
Argillite. Age: Paleozoic to Late Jurassic, 145 to 542 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Oligocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 34 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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.
Rain that falls on Santa Monica runs straight into the Pacific Ocean.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Santa Monica; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Santa Monica has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 77° in August; winter nights fall to about 49° in December. About 12 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Santa Monica normally reaches 71° and falls to 54°. The record high is 90°, in 2013; the record low 43°, in 2000. The most rain on this date, 1.27 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1944 from the Los Angeles Airport Area threaded record (Los Angeles International Airport, 8 miles southeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
