The Heathrow 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.
90° on Nov. 13, 2015, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1899. Next is 89° in 1957.
Heathrow’s center stands about 70 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 20 ft to 100 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cypresshead Formation (sand), from the Late Pliocene, 2.6 to 3.6 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. Age: Late Pliocene, 2.6 to 3.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Middle Miocene to Late Miocene, 5.3 to 16 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 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 Heathrow reaches the St. Johns River and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Wekiva, Blue Creek and Trout Creek: about 170 river miles.
Lake on the way: George, Lake.
100 miles of the trip are on Trout Creek.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Heathrow; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Heathrow has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 49° in January. About 54 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Heathrow normally reaches 78° and falls to 59°. The record high is 88°, in 2018; the record low 38°, in 1968. The most rain on this date, 1.62 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1899 at Sanford, 7 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.