The Raleigh 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. 17, 1957, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1890. Next is 89° in 2023.
Raleigh’s center stands about 80 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 50 ft to 130 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ocala Limestone, from the Late Eocene, 34 to 38 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.
Limestone. Age: Late Eocene, 34 to 38 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Middle Miocene to Late Miocene, 5.3 to 16 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 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.
Raleigh has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 43° in January. About 48 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Raleigh normally reaches 75° and falls to 51°. The record high is 86°, in 1955; the record low 31°, in 1963. The most rain on this date, 1.78 in, fell in 1949.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1890 from the Gainesville Area threaded record (Gainesville Regional Airport, 20 miles northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
