The Sonora 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
Chance of showers
Mostly cloudy; cooler
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Partly cloudy
92° on Nov. 17, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1902. Next is 88° in 1903.
Sonora’s center stands about 2,130 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,100 ft to 2,300 ft, a difference of 200 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Quaternary deposit, undivided (coarse-detrital, fine-detrital), from the Quaternary, 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 50×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 113 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 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 Sonora reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Dry Devils, the Devils and the Rio Grande: about 700 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Paz Ramirez Lake and Amistad Reservoir.
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 Sonora; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sonora has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 96° in July; winter nights fall to about 31° in January. About 23 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Sonora normally reaches 70° and falls to 41°. The record high is 88°, in 1903; the record low 21°, in 1982. The most rain on this date, 1.00 in, fell in 1958.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1902 at Sonora, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
