California North Coast area

The North Coast area of California is well known for the excellence of its white table wines. Climate factors, primarily the cooling effects of the bays and ocean, provide optimum conditions for production of grapes and wines of distinctive character and proper balance. A history of wine production in the area has provided time for development and improvement of viticultural and vinification techniques. Recent substantial increase in demand for varietal white table wines has encouraged further development of new and improved winemaking techniques and has resulted in increased plantings of white wine grapes. 

The North Coast area represents 20 percent of California s total wine-grape acreage. Its plantings of Chardonnay, Sauvignon blanc, White Riesling, and Gewurztraminer represent a substantial portion of the state crop of these white varieties (Table IV). 

Dengler L, McPherson R (1993) The 17 August 1991 Honeydew earthquake north coast California a case for revising the Modified Mercalli Scale in sparsely populated areas. Bull Seismol Soc Am... 

In the same manner as large island chains were carried to North America on moving plates of oceanic crust, small pieces of land came to the coasts in this way as well. Numerous exotic terrains, impacting on the western coasts during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras, added large areas now covered by British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California, and Mexico. These little rafts of continental crust were formed far from their present location, for the fossils in them are of creatures that lived halfway around the world-but never in North America. A sizeable piece of continental crust-southern Mexico as far south as the Isthmus of Tehuantepec-joined northern Mexico between 180-140 million years ago. 

Primary coasts are also formed by shifts in the Earth s crust. When plates of the crust change positions, they can create large tears or splits called faults. If a fault forms at the coast, seawater rushes into it and creates a fault bay. The Gulf of California, also called the Sea of Cortes, lies between Baja California and mainland Mexico. At one time, Baja California was part of the North American continent. When the crustal plates slid horizontally past each other, a bit of land, the area now known as Baja California, was ripped away from the continent. 

On the eastern side of the subtropical anticyclones the inversion is strengthened by the southerly flow of cool, dry air (recall that in the Northern Hemisphere the rotation in an anticyclone is clockwise). Particularly in coastal areas the low-level air is cooled by contact with the cold ocean, an exchange that tends to strengthen the inversion. Since the air aloft, as well as the southbound low-level flow, is warming, there is little precipitation in these regions. Thus on the west coasts of continents it is common to find arid, desert-like conditions, such as the deserts of southern California, the Sahara in North Africa, the desert in western Australia, and the coastal plains of South America. 

B. Heneman in Persistent Marine Debris in the North Sea, Northwest Atlantic Ocean, Wider Caribbean Area and the West Coast of Baja California, US Department of Commerce, Washington, DC, USA, 1988. 

Floodplain Extent. It has been estimated that 100-year floodplains make up from 7 to 10 percent of the total land area of the United States. The floodplains with the largest areas are located in the southern portions of the country those with large populations are located along the north Atlantic coast, the Great Lakes, and California. 

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