The Southern Pines 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.
Sunny
Sunny; warmer
Sunny
Sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
4.93 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1952. The next wettest, 4.58 inches, fell in 2020.
Southern Pines’s center stands about 510 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 340 ft to 620 ft, a difference of 280 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pinehurst Formation (sand), from the Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old.
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 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.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 5 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 Southern Pines reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of Mill Creek, the Little River and the Cape Fear: about 210 river miles.
160 miles of the trip are on the Cape Fear.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Southern Pines; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Southern Pines has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 32° in January. About 48 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Southern Pines normally reaches 63° and falls to 42°. The record high is 82°, in 1964; the record low 20°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.47 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1952 at Jackson Springs 5 WNW, 16 miles west, 220 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
