The Sunset Beach 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.
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4.36 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1931. The next wettest, 3.66 inches, fell in 2009.
Sunset Beach’s center stands barely above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 80 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country. Open water lies within three miles.
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 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. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, clay, gravel. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 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 Sunset Beach reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of Calabash Creek, the Little River and the Waccamaw: about 65 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Sunset Beach; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sunset Beach has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 37° in January. About 48 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Sunset Beach normally reaches 67° and falls to 46°. The record high is 82°, in 1931; the record low 23°, in 2013. The most rain on this date, 0.75 in, fell in 1952.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1931 from the Myrtle Beach Area threaded record (North Myrtle Beach, 13 miles west-southwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
