The Dover 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 cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
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3° on Nov. 17, 1967, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 6° in 1933.
Dover’s center stands about 70 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 10 ft to 240 ft, a difference of 230 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Hussey Mountain, about 1,200 ft, 15 miles northwest.
The section below crosses 10 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 34×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granofels, biotite-schist. Age: Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Phyllite, quartzite, mica-schist. Age: Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Alkali-feldspar-granite. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granite. 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. 4 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Dover reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Bellamy and the Piscataqua: about 11 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Dover; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Dover has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. A normal year brings about 39 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 45 inches of water.
On November 14 Dover normally reaches 49° and falls to 31°. The record high is 71°, in 1989; the record low 6°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.14 in, fell in 1937.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Durham, 5 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
