The Cape May 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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78° on Nov. 15, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1871. Next is 74° in 1949.
Cape May’s center stands about 13 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 40 ft, a difference of 40 ft: nearly flat ground. Open water lies within three miles.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Unnamed Formation at Cape May (sand, clay), from the Late Pliocene, 2.6 to 3.6 million years old.
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, clay. Age: Late Pliocene, 2.6 to 3.6 million years old. About 12 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.
Rain that falls on Cape May runs straight into the Atlantic Ocean.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cape May; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cape May has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 29° in January. A normal year brings about 15 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 44 inches of water.
On November 14 Cape May normally reaches 57° and falls to 41°. The record high is 74°, in 1993; the record low 20°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.64 in, fell in 1995.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1871 at Cape May 2 NW, 2 miles northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
