The College Park 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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80° on Nov. 16, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1941. Next is 78° in 1985.
College Park’s center stands about 90 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 20 ft to 240 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Daniel, about 480 ft, 14 miles west-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Lowland Deposits (fine-detrital, coarse-detrital), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 36×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Biotite-schist. Age: Proterozoic, 542 to 2,500 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Muscovite-gneiss. Age: Proterozoic, 542 to 2,500 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 College Park reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Paint Branch, the Northeast Branch Anacostia, the Anacostia and the Potomac: about 120 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of College Park; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
College Park has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 25° in January. A normal year brings about 16 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 44 inches of water.
On November 14 College Park normally reaches 57° and falls to 37°. The record high is 77°, in 1955; the record low 18°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.98 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1941 at Beltsville, 3 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
