The Pullman 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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72° on Nov. 12, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 71° in 1904.
Pullman’s center stands about 2,360 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,330 ft to 2,670 ft, a difference of 340 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is West Twin, about 4,480 ft, 14 miles east-northeast.
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 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 10×. 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.
Basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 28 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, granite. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 67 to 107 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Mixed-clastic. Age: Early Miocene to Late Miocene, 8 to 17 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.4 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Precambrian to Eocene. About 0.1 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 Pullman reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the South Fork Palouse, the Palouse, the Snake and the Columbia: about 490 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 Pullman; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Pullman has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in December. About 18 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Pullman normally reaches 45° and falls to 33°. The record high is 65°, in 1999; the record low 2°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 1.20 in, fell in 1906.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the Pullman Area threaded record (Pullman Moscow Regional Airport, 3 miles east-northeast, 180 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
