The Clayton 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.
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
16° on Nov. 17, 1933, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 19° in 1920.
Clayton’s center stands about 50 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 10 ft to 130 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Chesapeake Group (silt), from the Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. 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: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 18 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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.
A raindrop that lands in Clayton reaches Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Mill Creek, the Smyrna and the Delaware: about 25 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Clayton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Clayton has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. A normal year brings about 13 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 48 inches of water.
On November 14 Clayton normally reaches 58° and falls to 40°. The record high is 76°, in 1955; the record low 19°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.00 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Dover, 12 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
