The Spotswood 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. 16, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 76° in 2020.
Spotswood’s center stands about 40 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 10 ft to 180 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Beacon Hill, about 430 ft, 9 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Magothy Formation (sand), from the Late Cretaceous, 84 to 87 million years old.
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: Late Cretaceous, 84 to 87 million years old. About 21 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 84 million years old. About 0.5 mi of the line.
Clay, silt. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 87 million years old. About 0.3 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 Spotswood reaches New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Cedar Brook, Manalapan Brook, the South River and the Raritan: about 19 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Spotswood; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Spotswood has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. A normal year brings about 29 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 50 inches of water.
On November 14 Spotswood normally reaches 56° and falls to 36°. The record high is 72°, in 1955; the record low 15°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.81 in, fell in 1940.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the New Brunswick Area threaded record (New Brunswick 3 SE, 6 miles north-northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
