The Piney Point 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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5.21 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1945. The next wettest, 3.95 inches, fell in 2020.
Piney Point’s center stands about 10 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 100 ft, a difference of 100 ft: gently rolling country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Prospect Hill, about 180 ft, 13 miles west-southwest.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. 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 7 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 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.
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 Piney Point reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Potomac: about 20 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Piney Point; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Piney Point has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 29° in January. A normal year brings about 12 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 45 inches of water.
On November 14 Piney Point normally reaches 59° and falls to 42°. The record high is 78°, in 1955; the record low 24°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.44 in, fell in 1995.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1945 at Patuxent River Nas, 12 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
