The South Dos Palos 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; cooler
Mostly sunny
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.
South Dos Palos’s center stands about 110 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 100 ft to 130 ft, a difference of 30 ft: nearly flat ground.
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 23×. 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 19 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 0.5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Oligocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 34 million years old. About 0.5 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 South Dos Palos reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of the Devon Drain, Mud Slough, Salt Slough, the San Joaquin and New York Slough: about 160 river miles.
130 miles of the trip are on the San Joaquin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of South Dos Palos; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
South Dos Palos 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 South Dos Palos 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, 13 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
