The Forest Heights 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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83° on Nov. 15, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1871. Next is 80° in 1879.
Forest Heights’s center stands about 190 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 290 ft, a difference of 290 ft: rolling country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Gantt Hill, about 510 ft, 15 miles west-northwest.
The section below crosses 10 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 49×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Gravel, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Biotite-schist. Age: Proterozoic, 542 to 2,500 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Biotite-gneiss. Age: Middle Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 456 to 464 million years old. About 1 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. 4 smaller units 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 Forest Heights reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Oxon Run and the Potomac: about 110 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Forest Heights; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Forest Heights has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 30° in January. A normal year brings about 14 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 42 inches of water.
On November 14 Forest Heights normally reaches 59° and falls to 42°. The record high is 77°, in 1985; the record low 19°, in 1920. The most rain on this date, 1.56 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1871 from the Washington Area threaded record (Washington Reagan National Airport, 3 miles northwest, 180 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
