The Colonial Park 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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76° on Nov. 15, 1973, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1888. Next is 76° in 1993.
Colonial Park’s center stands about 530 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 380 ft to 540 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Broad Mountain, about 1,790 ft, 15 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Hamburg sequence rocks (shale), from the Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old.
The section below crosses 16 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 14×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Siltstone-mudstone, shale. Age: Triassic, 202 to 252 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Jurassic, 145 to 202 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 10 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 Colonial Park reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Nyes Run, Beaver Creek, Swatara Creek and the Susquehanna: about 80 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Aldred.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Colonial Park; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Colonial Park 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 30 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 44 inches of water.
On November 14 Colonial Park normally reaches 54° and falls to 36°. The record high is 74°, in 1989; the record low 19°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.74 in, fell in 1995.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1888 from the Middletown-Harrisburg Area threaded record (Middletown Harrisburg Int'L Airport, 7 miles south-southeast, 230 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
