The Riverside 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
Showers likely
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
63° on Nov. 15, 2021, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1909. Next is 62° in 1990.
Riverside’s center stands about 870 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 840 ft to 3,030 ft, a difference of 2,190 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Tunk Mountain, about 6,020 ft, 13 miles east-northeast.
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 4×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granite. Age: Precambrian to Eocene. About 9 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Permian to Triassic, 202 to 299 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Schist. Age: Triassic to Early Cretaceous, 100 to 252 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Quartz-monzonite, granite, basalt. Age: Eocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 56 million years old. About 2 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 Riverside reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Okanogan and the Columbia: about 570 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Umatilla.
250 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Riverside; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Riverside has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. About 12 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Riverside normally reaches 44° and falls to 29°. The record high is 59°, in 2016; the record low 3°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.61 in, fell in 1963.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1909 from the Omak Area threaded record (Omak, 3 miles south-southwest, 430 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
