The Three Rivers 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
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers; cooler
Mostly sunny
Showers likely
Showers likely
Mostly sunny
89° on Nov. 12, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1899. Next is 88° in 2025.
Three Rivers’s center stands about 870 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 710 ft to 3,040 ft, a difference of 2,330 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Paradise Peak, about 9,330 ft, 12 miles east-northeast.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 2×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Diorite, gabbro. Age: Triassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 252 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.6 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 Three Rivers reaches the Tulare Lake basin by way of the Kaweah, Mill Creek and the Tule: about 75 river miles. The Tulare Lake basin has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Often dry. About 60% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
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 Three Rivers; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Three Rivers has a hot semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 100° in July; winter nights fall to about 37° in December. About 14 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Three Rivers normally reaches 69° and falls to 43°. The record high is 84°, in 1990; the record low 29°, in 1938. The most rain on this date, 1.25 in, fell in 1952.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1899 at Lemon Cove, 8 miles west-southwest, 360 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
