The Westhaven-Moonstone 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.
78° on Nov. 12, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1945. Next is 74° in 2018.
Westhaven-Moonstone’s center stands about 680 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 10 ft to 1,380 ft, a difference of 1,370 ft: steep hill country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is White Rocks, about 3,610 ft, 15 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Older Quaternary alluvium and marine deposits (coarse-detrital), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 6×. 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 8 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Mica-schist. Age: Early Cretaceous, 110 to 143 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 Westhaven-Moonstone reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Little River: about 1 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Westhaven-Moonstone; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Westhaven-Moonstone has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 65° in September; winter nights fall to about 40° in December. About 46 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Westhaven-Moonstone normally reaches 59° and falls to 42°. The record high is 67°, in 2001; the record low 29°, in 1993. The most rain on this date, 0.59 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1945 at Arcata Eureka Airport, 4 miles south, 470 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.