The Kirkwood 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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74° on Nov. 11, 2024, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1978. Next is 72° in 1993.
Kirkwood’s center stands about 530 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 310 ft to 710 ft, a difference of 400 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Gap Hill, about 880 ft, 10 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Peters Creek Schist (mica-schist, quartzite), from the Paleozoic, 252 to 542 million years old.
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 29×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Mica-schist, quartzite. Age: Paleozoic, 252 to 542 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Schist, phyllite. Age: Paleozoic, 252 to 542 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Precambrian. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Cambrian to Ordovician, 445 to 542 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Quartzite, schist. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 0.5 mi of the line.
Quartzite. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 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.
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 Kirkwood reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of West Branch Octoraro Creek, Octoraro Creek and the Susquehanna: about 35 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Kirkwood; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Kirkwood has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 18 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 48 inches of water.
On November 14 Kirkwood normally reaches 54° and falls to 33°. The record high is 72°, in 1993; the record low 15°, in 2022. The most rain on this date, 0.92 in, fell in 1995.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1978 at Octoraro Lake, 5 miles south-southeast, 270 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
