The Sunnyvale 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.
Sunnyvale’s center stands about 130 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 20 ft to 290 ft, a difference of 270 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Bielawski, about 3,280 ft, 11 miles south-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 13×. 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.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Jurassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 202 million years old. About 0.8 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.
Rain that falls on Sunnyvale runs only a short way, about 2 miles, to San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Sunnyvale; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sunnyvale 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 Sunnyvale 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, 6 miles east). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
