The Laurel 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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Sunny
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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.
Laurel’s center stands about 170 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 120 ft to 400 ft, a difference of 280 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Chestnut Hill, about 610 ft, 14 miles north-northeast.
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 37×. 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 10 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 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Muscovite-gneiss. Age: Proterozoic, 542 to 2,500 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 0.3 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 Laurel reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Bear Branch and the Patuxent: about 80 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Laurel; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Laurel 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 Laurel 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, 7 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
