The Bethlehem 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.
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy; warmer
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77° on Nov. 15, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1912. Next is 74° in 1973.
Bethlehem’s center stands about 410 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 210 ft to 630 ft, a difference of 420 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Scotts Mountain, about 1,290 ft, 15 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Allentown Formation (dolostone, limestone), from the Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 22×. 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, limestone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 18 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Cambrian to Early Ordovician, 471 to 497 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 0.5 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 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. 1 smaller unit 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 Bethlehem reaches Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Nancy Run, the Lehigh and the Delaware: about 160 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bethlehem; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bethlehem has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 33 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 47 inches of water.
On November 14 Bethlehem normally reaches 54° and falls to 34°. The record high is 73°, in 1993; the record low 17°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 2.41 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1912 from the Allentown Area threaded record (Allentown Lehigh Valley International Airport, 7 miles west). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
