The Nags Head 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.
Mostly sunny
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Partly cloudy
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81° on Nov. 12, 1985, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1966. Next is 78° in 2021.
Nags Head’s center stands about 8 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 70 ft, a difference of 70 ft: gently rolling country. Open water lies within three miles.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Surficial Deposits, Undivided (sand, clay, gravel), from the Quaternary, less than 2.6 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.
Sand, clay, gravel. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 13 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.
Rain that falls on Nags Head runs straight into Albemarle Sound and the Atlantic Ocean.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Nags Head; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Nags Head has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. About 46 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Nags Head normally reaches 62° and falls to 48°. The record high is 76°, in 1985; the record low 26°, in 1976. The most rain on this date, 0.50 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1966 at Manteo, 5 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
