The Harrington 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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62° on Nov. 13, 1990, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 62° in 1999.
Harrington’s center stands about 2,150 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,070 ft to 2,360 ft, a difference of 290 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Miocene volcanic rocks (basalt), from the Late Oligocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 28 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 33×. 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 14 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 28 million years old. About 10 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 Harrington reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Coal Creek, Crab Creek, Lower Crab Creek and the Columbia: about 560 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Umatilla, Potholes Reservoir and Moses Lake.
210 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Harrington; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Harrington has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 30 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 14 inches of water.
On November 14 Harrington normally reaches 42° and falls to 25°. The record high is 57°, in 1995; the record low −3°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.68 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Davenport, 13 miles north-northeast, 280 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
