The Cape Canaveral 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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89° on Nov. 12, 2002, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1937. Next is 89° in 2014.
Cape Canaveral’s center stands about 13 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 40 ft, a difference of 40 ft: nearly flat ground. Open water lies within three miles.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Beach ridge and dune (sand, clay), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, limestone. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, limestone. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old. About 0.8 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.
Rain that falls on Cape Canaveral runs straight into the Atlantic Ocean.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cape Canaveral; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cape Canaveral has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 52° in January. About 51 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Cape Canaveral normally reaches 77° and falls to 61°. The record high is 87°, in 1970; the record low 40°, in 1963. The most rain on this date, 3.02 in, fell in 1941.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1937 from the Melbourne Area threaded record (Melbourne Wfo, 20 miles south). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
