The Seattle 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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70° on Nov. 14, 1995, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is 66° in 1905.
Seattle’s center stands about 200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 440 ft, a difference of 440 ft: hilly country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Cougar Mountain, about 1,530 ft, 12 miles east-southeast.
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 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 39×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 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.
Rain that falls on Seattle runs straight into Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Seattle; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Seattle has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 77° in August; winter nights fall to about 37° in January. About 38 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 4 inches of snow.
On November 14 Seattle normally reaches 52° and falls to 41°. The record high is 70°, in 1995; the record low 15°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 2.27 in, fell in 1906.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 from the Seattle City Area threaded record (Seattle Sand Point Wfo, 7 miles north-northeast, 140 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
