The Wilmington 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.
Wilmington’s center stands about 120 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 350 ft, a difference of 350 ft: rolling country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Iron Hill, about 430 ft, 13 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Banded Gneiss, from the Paleozoic, 252 to 542 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 40×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Gneiss. Age: Paleozoic, 252 to 542 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand, clay, silt. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 84 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Mica-schist. Age: Paleozoic, 252 to 542 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Precambrian. About 2 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Precambrian. 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. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 Wilmington reaches Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Christina and the Delaware: about 40 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Wilmington; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Wilmington 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 Wilmington 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, 6 miles south-southwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
