The Willows 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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24° on Nov. 13, 1985, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1903. Next is 25° in 1978.
Willows’s center stands about 140 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 110 ft to 160 ft, a difference of 50 ft: nearly flat ground. The highest named summit within 15 miles is High Peak, about 1,860 ft, 14 miles west-southwest.
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 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 22×. 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 20 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Siltstone-mudstone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 113 to 145 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 Willows reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of the Colusa Basin Drainage Canal and the Sacramento: about 160 river miles.
85 miles of the trip are on the Sacramento.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Willows; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Willows has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 37° in December. About 21 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Willows normally reaches 66° and falls to 43°. The record high is 83°, in 2013; the record low 25°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 2.26 in, fell in 1953.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1903 at Orland, 15 miles north, 110 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
