The Sandia 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.
Chance of showers
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Chance of showers; cooler
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy; warmer
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Partly cloudy
31° on Nov. 14, 2018, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1964. Next is 33° in 1970.
Sandia’s center stands about 130 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 60 ft to 200 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Lissie Formation (silt, sand, clay), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 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.
Silt, sand, clay. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Clay, sandstone. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Clay, silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million 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 Sandia reaches Corpus Christi Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Lain Creek, Javelin Creek and the Nueces: about 40 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Sandia; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sandia has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 96° in August; winter nights fall to about 44° in January. About 28 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Sandia normally reaches 75° and falls to 54°. The record high is 90°, in 1993; the record low 31°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 1.68 in, fell in 1998.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1964 at Mathis 4 SSW, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
