The Townsend 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.
Partly cloudy
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Partly cloudy
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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.
Townsend’s center stands about 70 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 20 ft to 140 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Rancocas Formation (sand), from the Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 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.
Sand. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 1 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 Townsend reaches Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Appoquinimink and the Delaware: about 30 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Townsend; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Townsend 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 Townsend 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, 20 miles north-northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
