The Deer Lake 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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78° on Nov. 15, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1858. Next is 74° in 1902.
Deer Lake’s center stands about 490 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 450 ft to 1,240 ft, a difference of 790 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Dans Pulpit, about 1,660 ft, 7 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Hamilton Group (black-shale), from the Early Devonian to Middle Devonian, 384 to 422 million years old.
The section below crosses 9 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 13×. 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 6 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Early Devonian to Middle Devonian, 384 to 422 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 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. 3 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 Deer Lake reaches Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Pine Creek, the Schuylkill and the Delaware: about 170 river miles.
110 miles of the trip are on the Schuylkill.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Deer Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Deer Lake has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. About 45 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Deer Lake normally reaches 54° and falls to 36°. The record high is 74°, in 1955; the record low 16°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.37 in, fell in 1995.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1858 from the Reading Area threaded record (Reading 4 SW, 21 miles south, 170 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
