The Touchet 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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4° on Nov. 15, 2014, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1962. Next is 6° in 1978.
Touchet’s center stands about 440 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 420 ft to 720 ft, a difference of 300 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Clover Hill, about 1,100 ft, 11 miles west.
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 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 11×. 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, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Middle Miocene, 12 to 16 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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 Touchet reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Touchet, the Walla Walla and the Columbia: about 330 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 Touchet; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Touchet has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. About 15 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Touchet normally reaches 51° and falls to 31°. The record high is 76°, in 1999; the record low 6°, in 1978. The most rain on this date, 0.66 in, fell in 2001.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1962 at Whitman Mission, 10 miles east, 190 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
