The Sunbury 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
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
10.84 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1945. The next wettest, 6.86 inches, fell in 2020.
Sunbury’s center stands about 40 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 20 ft to 80 ft, a difference of 60 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 5 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 17 mi of the line.
Sand, clay, gravel. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Tertiary to Quaternary, less than 66 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.6 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 Sunbury reaches Albemarle Sound and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Harrell Swamp, Bennetts Creek and the Chowan: about 45 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Sunbury; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sunbury has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 31° in January. A normal year brings about 6 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 52 inches of water.
On November 14 Sunbury normally reaches 61° and falls to 41°. The record high is 79°, in 1951; the record low 24°, in 1976. The most rain on this date, 1.06 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1945 at Suffolk Lake Kilby, 20 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
