The Little Orleans 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, 2001, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1945. Next is 77° in 1973.
Little Orleans’s center stands about 480 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 440 ft to 1,680 ft, a difference of 1,240 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is High Point, about 2,610 ft, 13 miles south.
The section below crosses 15 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 11×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Devonian to Late Devonian, 374 to 422 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Siltstone. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 9 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 Little Orleans reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Fifteenmile Creek and the Potomac: about 260 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Little Orleans; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Little Orleans has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. About 43 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Little Orleans normally reaches 55° and falls to 33°. The record high is 70°, in 1994; the record low 13°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.05 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1945 at Cacapon St Prk # 2, 9 miles south-southeast, 480 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
