The Rockville 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.
20° on Nov. 16, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1961. Next is 25° in 1997.
Rockville’s center stands about 320 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 90 ft to 340 ft, a difference of 250 ft: rolling country.
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 47×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand, clay. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Oligocene, 23 to 34 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Clay, limestone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 0.5 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 Rockville reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Limestone Creek, the Tombigbee and the Mobile: about 85 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Rockville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Rockville has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. About 60 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Rockville normally reaches 69° and falls to 43°. The record high is 84°, in 1993; the record low 26°, in 2013. The most rain on this date, 2.00 in, fell in 1961.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1961 at Jackson, 9 miles northwest, 100 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.