The Pennington 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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79° on Nov. 15, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1865. Next is 77° in 1973.
Pennington’s center stands about 220 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 130 ft to 420 ft, a difference of 290 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Sourland Mountain, about 640 ft, 10 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Passaic Formation (siltstone), from the Late Triassic to Early Jurassic, 175 to 237 million years old.
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 32×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Siltstone. Age: Late Triassic to Early Jurassic, 175 to 237 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Siltstone-mudstone, sandstone-mudstone. Age: Late Triassic, 202 to 237 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Arkose. Age: Late Triassic, 202 to 237 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Plutonic. Age: Jurassic, 145 to 202 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Arkose. Age: Triassic, 202 to 252 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 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 Pennington reaches New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Stony Brook, the Millstone and the Raritan: about 55 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Pennington; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Pennington has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. A normal year brings about 27 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 46 inches of water.
On November 14 Pennington normally reaches 55° and falls to 37°. The record high is 72°, in 1993; the record low 16°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.89 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1865 from the Trenton Area threaded record (Trenton-Mercer Airport, 4 miles south-southwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
