The Speed 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
Mostly sunny; warmer
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
7.15 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1870. The next wettest, 6.70 inches, fell in 2009.
Speed’s center stands about 60 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 50 ft to 130 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
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.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
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 23 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 2 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 Speed reaches Pamlico Sound and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Longs Branch, Deep Creek, the Tar and the Pamlico: about 100 river miles.
55 miles of the trip are on the Tar.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Speed; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Speed has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 30° in January. About 48 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 5 inches of snow.
On November 14 Speed normally reaches 64° and falls to 40°. The record high is 82°, in 1924; the record low 17°, in 1976. The most rain on this date, 1.50 in, fell in 1873.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1870 at Tarboro 1 S, 8 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
