The Santa Nella 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.
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
Showers likely
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
Showers likely
Partly cloudy
84° on Nov. 16, 2004, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1906. Next is 83° in 1933.
Santa Nella’s center stands about 150 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 110 ft to 350 ft, a difference of 240 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Cathedral Peak, about 3,410 ft, 14 miles southwest.
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 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 9×. 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 to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Melange. Age: Jurassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 202 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.
Serpentinite. Age: Middle Jurassic to Late Jurassic, 145 to 175 million years old. About 0.6 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 Santa Nella reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Los Banos Creek, the San Joaquin and New York Slough: about 150 river miles.
120 miles of the trip are on the San Joaquin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Santa Nella; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Santa Nella has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in July; winter nights fall to about 38° in December. About 10 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Santa Nella normally reaches 66° and falls to 45°. The record high is 78°, in 2005; the record low 25°, in 1938. The most rain on this date, 1.12 in, fell in 1965.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1906 at Los Banos, 9 miles east-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
