The Bishop 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.
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
Showers likely; cooler
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Chance of showers
Mostly sunny
6.21 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1951. The next wettest, 3.14 inches, fell in 2023.
Bishop’s center stands about 60 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 40 ft to 70 ft, a difference of 30 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Beaumont Formation, areas predominantly clay (clay, silt), 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 64×. 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, silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 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 Bishop reaches the Gulf of America by way of Carreta Creek and San Fernando Creek: about 14 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bishop; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bishop has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 97° in August; winter nights fall to about 47° in January. About 31 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Bishop normally reaches 77° and falls to 56°. The record high is 93°, in 1989; the record low 31°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.38 in, fell in 2023.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1951 at Kingsville, 5 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
