The Jessup 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.
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Sunny
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Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
79° on Nov. 15, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1950. Next is 77° in 1955.
Jessup’s center stands about 200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 120 ft to 380 ft, a difference of 260 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Chestnut Hill, about 610 ft, 10 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Potomac Group, including Raritan and Patapsco Formations, Arundel Clay, and Patuxent Formation (sand), from the Cretaceous, 66 to 145 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 39×. 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: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Biotite-schist. Age: Proterozoic, 542 to 2,500 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Precambrian. About 2 mi of the line.
Gabbro. Age: Proterozoic to Paleozoic, 252 to 2,500 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Quartz-monzonite. Age: Middle Ordovician to Late Devonian, 370 to 470 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 0.9 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 Jessup reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Dorsey Run, the Little Patuxent and the Patuxent: about 80 river miles.
65 miles of the trip are on the Patuxent.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Jessup; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Jessup has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 25° in January. A normal year brings about 19 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 45 inches of water.
On November 14 Jessup normally reaches 58° and falls to 37°. The record high is 77°, in 1989; the record low 18°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.86 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1950 at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, 5 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
