The Benton City 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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76° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1944. Next is 73° in 1989.
Benton City’s center stands about 480 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 460 ft to 1,760 ft, a difference of 1,300 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Rattlesnake Mountain, about 3,560 ft, 11 miles north-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (silt, sand), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 9×. 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. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Early Eocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 56 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 28 million years old. About 0.4 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 Benton City reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Yakima and the Columbia: about 360 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 Benton City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Benton City has a cold desert climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 29° in January. About 7 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Benton City normally reaches 49° and falls to 34°. The record high is 70°, in 2021; the record low 8°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.25 in, fell in 2016.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1944 at Richland, 11 miles east-northeast, 110 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
