The Mount Olive 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.
87° on Nov. 15, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1900. Next is 84° in 1955.
Mount Olive’s center stands about 170 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 140 ft to 200 ft, a difference of 60 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Black Creek Formation (clay, sand), from the Cretaceous, 66 to 145 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, sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 24 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 Mount Olive reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Northeast Cape Fear and the Cape Fear: about 160 river miles.
130 miles of the trip are on the Northeast Cape Fear.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Mount Olive; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mount Olive has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 34° in January. About 52 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Mount Olive normally reaches 66° and falls to 44°. The record high is 84°, in 1955; the record low 23°, in 1976. The most rain on this date, 1.11 in, fell in 1945.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1900 at Goldsboro Seymour Johnson Afb, 12 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.