The Wilmington 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 cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
6° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1915. Next is 7° in 1933.
Wilmington’s center stands about 1,020 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 960 ft to 1,080 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 58×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 434 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 454 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 454 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 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.
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 Wilmington reaches the Gulf of America by way of Lytle Creek, the Todd Fork, the Little Miami, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,550 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Wilmington; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Wilmington has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. About 42 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Wilmington normally reaches 52° and falls to 34°. The record high is 77°, in 1931; the record low 9°, in 1976. The most rain on this date, 1.75 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1915 from the Wilmington Area threaded record (Wilmington Air Park, 3 miles east-southeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
