The Dover 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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16° on Nov. 17, 1933, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 19° in 1920.
Dover’s center stands about 30 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 100 ft, a difference of 100 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.
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.
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 Dover reaches Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Saint Jones: about 12 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Dover; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Dover 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 Dover 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, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
