The Waukena 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
Sunny
Showers likely
Showers likely
Mostly sunny
24° on Nov. 17, 1961, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 26° in 1955.
Waukena’s center stands about 210 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 190 ft to 230 ft, a difference of 40 ft: nearly flat ground.
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.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. 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 24 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 Waukena reaches the Tulare Lake basin by way of Cameron Creek and the Tule: about 20 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 40% 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 Waukena; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Waukena has a cold desert climate. Summer afternoons average 98° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in December. Barely 0.0 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Waukena normally reaches 67° and falls to 41°. The record high is 79°, in 1995; the record low 31°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 0.90 in, fell in 1953.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Corcoran Irrigation Dist., 5 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
