The Waterford 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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28° on Nov. 16, 1921, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 28° in 1924.
Waterford’s center stands about 170 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 80 ft to 220 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country.
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 45×. 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 19 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 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.
A raindrop that lands in Waterford reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of the Tuolumne, the San Joaquin and New York Slough: about 100 river miles.
80 miles of the trip are on the San Joaquin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Waterford; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Waterford has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 42° in January. About 12 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Waterford normally reaches 65° and falls to 47°. The record high is 81°, in 1921; the record low 29°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.24 in, fell in 1965.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Turlock #2, 11 miles south-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
