The Stow Creek 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.
80° on Nov. 15, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is 78° in 1973.
Stow Creek’s center stands about 100 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 150 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cohansey Formation (sand), from the Middle Miocene, 12 to 14 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: Middle Miocene, 12 to 14 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Early Miocene, 16 to 20 million years old. About 1 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 Stow Creek reaches Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Mad Horse Creek and the Delaware: about 25 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Stow Creek; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Stow Creek has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. A normal year brings about 20 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 45 inches of water.
On November 14 Stow Creek normally reaches 56° and falls to 38°. The record high is 76°, in 1955; the record low 20°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 2.42 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 from the Wilmington Area threaded record (Wilmington Airport, 20 miles northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.