The Los Altos 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
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy; cooler
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
24° on Nov. 15, 1908, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1902. Next is 29° in 1920.
Los Altos’s center stands about 540 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 460 ft to 640 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Yegua Formation (claystone, sandstone), from the Eocene, 34 to 56 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 53×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, claystone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Claystone, sandstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.5 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 Los Altos reaches the Gulf of America by way of Chacon Creek and the Rio Grande: about 370 river miles.
Lake on the way: Paz Ramirez Lake.
270 miles of the trip are on the Rio Grande.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Los Altos; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Los Altos has a hot semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 101° in August; winter nights fall to about 47° in January. About 21 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Los Altos normally reaches 77° and falls to 56°. The record high is 96°, in 1903; the record low 28°, in 1908. The most rain on this date, 0.46 in, fell in 1920.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1902 from the Laredo Area threaded record (Laredo International Airport, 6 miles west-northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
