The Taft 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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87° on Nov. 11, 1973, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is 86° in 2016.
Taft’s center stands about 950 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 670 ft to 1,680 ft, a difference of 1,010 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Midway Peak, about 3,640 ft, 9 miles west.
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 3 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 11 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 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.
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 Taft runs only a short way, about 4 miles, to the Tulare Lake basin. The Tulare Lake basin has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
A lake that comes back. The bed of Tulare Lake is farmland now; in very wet years it floods again.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Taft; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Taft has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 98° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in December. About 6 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Taft normally reaches 68° and falls to 41°. The record high is 82°, in 1990; the record low 30°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 0.39 in, fell in 1953.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1940 at Buttonwillow, 18 miles north, 720 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
