The Thunderbolt 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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86° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1945. Next is 85° in 1955.
Thunderbolt’s center stands about 13 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 70 ft, a difference of 70 ft: gently rolling country.
The section below crosses 5 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: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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 Thunderbolt reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Wilmington: about 10 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Thunderbolt; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Thunderbolt has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 40° in January. About 48 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Thunderbolt normally reaches 70° and falls to 48°. The record high is 83°, in 1993; the record low 28°, in 1968. The most rain on this date, 0.75 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1945 at Savannah Hunter Field, 5 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
