The Soap Lake 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
Chance of showers
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69° on Nov. 14, 2021, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1949. Next is 66° in 1999.
Soap Lake’s center stands about 1,090 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,070 ft to 1,680 ft, a difference of 610 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is High Hill, about 2,070 ft, 7 miles north-northeast.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 12×. 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 13 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 28 million years old. About 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.
Soap Lake has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. About 8 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Soap Lake normally reaches 46° and falls to 30°. The record high is 69°, in 2021; the record low 1°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.38 in, fell in 1963.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1949 at Ephrata Airport, 6 miles south-southwest, 160 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
