The Soquel 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.
Mostly sunny
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Partly cloudy
88° on Nov. 15, 2008, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1945. Next is 84° in 2005.
Soquel’s center stands about 50 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 10 ft to 750 ft, a difference of 740 ft: hilly country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Loma Prieta, about 3,780 ft, 11 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pliocene marine rocks (sandstone, mudstone), from the Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 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.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 7 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.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Eocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 56 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Mudstone, sandstone. Age: Paleocene to Oligocene, 23 to 66 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Oligocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 34 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit 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 Soquel reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Bates Creek and Soquel Creek: about 2 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Soquel; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Soquel has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 75° in September; winter nights fall to about 39° in December. About 22 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1945 at Watsonville Municipal Airport, 10 miles east-southeast, 110 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
