The Vacaville 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. 15, 2008, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1950. Next is 82° in 2010.
Vacaville’s center stands about 190 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 90 ft to 810 ft, a difference of 720 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Vaca, about 2,800 ft, 7 miles west-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Eocene marine rocks (mudstone, sandstone), from the Paleocene to Oligocene, 23 to 66 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 7×. 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 10 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Siltstone-mudstone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 113 to 145 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Mudstone, sandstone. Age: Paleocene to Oligocene, 23 to 66 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 0.4 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 Vacaville reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Cache Slough and the Sacramento: about 35 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Vacaville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Vacaville has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 40° in January. About 24 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Vacaville normally reaches 66° and falls to 46°. The record high is 79°, in 2008; the record low 22°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 2.15 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1950 at Fairfield, 7 miles southwest, 150 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
