The Royal Oak 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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9° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1934. Next is 13° in 1959.
Royal Oak’s center stands about 670 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 630 ft to 710 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Bedford Shale, from the Late Devonian, 359 to 384 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 50×. 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. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 0.6 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 Royal Oak reaches Lake St. Clair by way of Red Run and the Clinton: about 25 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Royal Oak; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Royal Oak has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. About 30 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Royal Oak normally reaches 49° and falls to 35°. The record high is 67°, in 1973; the record low 17°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.07 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1934 at Detroit City Airport, 9 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
