The Upper Lake 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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86° on Nov. 12, 2019, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1937. Next is 80° in 1949.
Upper Lake’s center stands about 1,350 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,320 ft to 2,530 ft, a difference of 1,210 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Goat Mountain, about 6,100 ft, 12 miles east-northeast.
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 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 5×. 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: Jurassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 202 million years old. About 21 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 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 Upper Lake reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Clear Lake, Cache Creek, Prospect Slough, Cache Slough and the Sacramento: about 160 river miles.
Lake on the way: Clear Lake.
120 miles of the trip are on Cache Creek.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Upper Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Upper Lake has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in July; winter nights fall to about 35° in January. About 45 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Upper Lake normally reaches 65° and falls to 38°. The record high is 80°, in 1995; the record low 25°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 1.70 in, fell in 1967.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1937 at Potter Valley Powerhouse, 18 miles northwest, 330 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
