The Visalia 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
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Mostly sunny
87° on Nov. 11, 1956, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1895. Next is 86° in 1900.
Visalia’s center stands about 340 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 310 ft to 360 ft, a difference of 50 ft: nearly flat ground. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Stokes Mountain, about 2,110 ft, 15 miles north-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 20×. 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 23 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 million years old. About 2 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 Visalia reaches the Tulare Lake basin by way of Mill Creek and the Tule: about 45 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 90% 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 Visalia; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Visalia has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 38° in January. About 10 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Visalia normally reaches 65° and falls to 44°. The record high is 85°, in 1986; the record low 24°, in 1911. The most rain on this date, 0.90 in, fell in 1955.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1895 at Visalia, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
