The Port Angeles 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.
64° on Nov. 17, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1980. Next is 62° in 1990.
Port Angeles’s center stands about 60 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 940 ft, a difference of 940 ft: steep hill country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Elk Mountain, about 6,730 ft, 14 miles south-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Glacial drift, undivided (sand, gravel), 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 3×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Basalt. Age: Early Paleocene to Middle Eocene, 40 to 64 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Triassic to Late Eocene, 34 to 252 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Graywacke, slate, argillite. Age: Eocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 56 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Eocene to Oligocene, 23 to 56 million years old. About 0.5 mi of the line.
Siltstone, sandstone. Age: Middle Eocene to Late Eocene, 34 to 48 million years old. About 0.3 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.
Rain that falls on Port Angeles runs straight into the Pacific Ocean.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Port Angeles; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Port Angeles has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 70° in July; winter nights fall to about 32° in January. About 17 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Port Angeles normally reaches 51° and falls to 35°. The record high is 62°, in 2004; the record low 20°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.94 in, fell in 2015.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1980 at Sequim 2 E, 17 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.