The Saratoga 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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84° on Nov. 17, 1932, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 83° in 2008.
Saratoga’s center stands about 430 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 230 ft to 2,120 ft, a difference of 1,890 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Loma Prieta, about 3,780 ft, 15 miles southeast.
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 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 6×. 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 8 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Oligocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 34 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Eocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 56 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Mudstone, sandstone. Age: Paleocene to Oligocene, 23 to 66 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 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. 2 smaller units 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 Saratoga reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Saratoga Creek: about 11 river miles.
Often dry. About 90% 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 Saratoga; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Saratoga has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in August; winter nights fall to about 42° in January. About 14 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Saratoga normally reaches 66° and falls to 46°. The record high is 83°, in 2008; the record low 27°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.23 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the San Jose Area threaded record (San Jose, 8 miles northeast, 380 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
