The Chowan Beach 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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7.08 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1872. The next wettest, 4.15 inches, fell in 1937.
Chowan Beach’s center stands about 40 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 80 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country. Open water lies within three miles.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Yorktown Formation and Duplin Formation, Undivided (clay), from the Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old.
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.
Clay. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 14 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 Chowan Beach reaches Albemarle Sound and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Chowan: about 15 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Chowan Beach; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Chowan Beach has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 34° in January. About 51 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Chowan Beach normally reaches 63° and falls to 44°. The record high is 79°, in 1916; the record low 24°, in 1920. The most rain on this date, 2.21 in, fell in 2008.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1872 at Edenton, 16 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
