The Whitewater 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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93° on Nov. 15, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 92° in 1989.
Whitewater’s center stands about 1,590 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,140 ft to 3,910 ft, a difference of 2,770 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is San Gorgonio Mountain, about 11,470 ft, 14 miles northwest.
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 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 2×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Miocene, 5.3 to 2,500 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Tonalite. Age: Middle Jurassic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 175 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1.0 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 Whitewater reaches Salton Sea by way of the Whitewater: about 55 river miles. Salton Sea has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Whitewater; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Whitewater has a hot semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 97° in August; winter nights fall to about 39° in December. About 12 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Whitewater normally reaches 73° and falls to 45°. The record high is 91°, in 2021; the record low 30°, in 2000. The most rain on this date, 0.29 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at San Jacinto, 19 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
