The Porterville 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
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
3.88 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1961. The next wettest, 3.40 inches, fell in 2014.
Porterville’s center stands about 210 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 180 ft to 390 ft, a difference of 210 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Porters Creek formation (clay), from the Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 46×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Clay. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 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 Porterville reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of the Sucarnoochee, the Tombigbee and the Mobile: about 270 river miles.
160 miles of the trip are on the Tombigbee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Porterville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Porterville has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. About 55 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Porterville normally reaches 68° and falls to 43°. The record high is 83°, in 2011; the record low 23°, in 1969. The most rain on this date, 1.14 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1961 at Meridian Naas, 11 miles south-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
