The Bowie 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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81° on Nov. 15, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is 78° in 1902.
Bowie’s center stands about 140 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 40 ft to 230 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Good Hope Hill, about 300 ft, 14 miles west-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pamunkey Group; Aquia Formation (sand), from the Paleocene, 56 to 66 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 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: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 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. 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 Bowie reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Collington Branch, the Western Branch Patuxent and the Patuxent: about 65 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bowie; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bowie has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 30° in January. About 44 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Bowie normally reaches 57° and falls to 43°. The record high is 78°, in 1993; the record low 18°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.96 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 from the Annapolis Area threaded record (Annapolis United States Naval Academy Asos, 13 miles east-northeast, 130 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
