The Adams 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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78° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1932. Next is 75° in 1990.
Adams’s center stands about 1,520 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,450 ft to 1,850 ft, a difference of 400 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Emigrant Hill, about 3,870 ft, 12 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Loess (silt, sand), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, 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 8×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Middle Miocene, 12 to 16 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Early Miocene to Middle Miocene, 12 to 23 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, mudstone. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 1 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 Adams reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Wildhorse Creek, the Umatilla and the Columbia: about 350 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Umatilla.
210 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Adams; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Adams has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in December. A normal year brings about 15 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 17 inches of water.
On November 14 Adams normally reaches 51° and falls to 30°. The record high is 75°, in 1999; the record low 1°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 0.57 in, fell in 1988.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1932 at Pendleton Branch Experiment Sta, 4 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
