The Pasadena 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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82° on Nov. 15, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1950. Next is 80° in 1973.
Pasadena’s center stands about 90 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 150 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Lawyers Hill, about 300 ft, 10 miles west-northwest.
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 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.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gabbro. Age: Proterozoic to Paleozoic, 252 to 2,500 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 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 Pasadena reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Stony Creek and the Patapsco: about 8 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Pasadena; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Pasadena has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 30° in January. About 44 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Pasadena normally reaches 58° and falls to 43°. The record high is 78°, in 1989; the record low 21°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 2.46 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1950 from the Baltimore Downtown Area threaded record (Maryland Science Center, 9 miles north-northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
