The New Castle 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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80° on Nov. 15, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is 78° in 1973.
New Castle’s center stands about 17 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 80 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Iron Hill, about 430 ft, 10 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Potomac Formation (sand, clay, silt), from the Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 46×. 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, silt. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Paleozoic, 252 to 542 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Paleozoic, 252 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 84 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Age: Paleozoic, 252 to 542 million years old. About 0.3 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 New Castle reaches Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Delaware: about 35 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of New Castle; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
New Castle has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. A normal year brings about 20 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 45 inches of water.
On November 14 New Castle normally reaches 56° and falls to 38°. The record high is 76°, in 1955; the record low 20°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 2.42 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 from the Wilmington Area threaded record (Wilmington Airport, 2 miles west-northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
