The Upper Darby 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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81° on Nov. 15, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1871. Next is 76° in 1955.
Upper Darby’s center stands about 80 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 10 ft to 260 ft, a difference of 250 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Hunting Hill, about 510 ft, 10 miles west-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Wissahickon Formation (mica-schist), from the Paleozoic, 252 to 542 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 36×. 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. Age: Paleozoic, 252 to 542 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Precambrian. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 84 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Precambrian. About 1 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Late Cretaceous, 84 to 87 million years old. About 1 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 Upper Darby reaches Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Darby Creek and the Delaware: about 60 river miles.
50 miles of the trip are on the Delaware.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Upper Darby; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Upper Darby has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. A normal year brings about 23 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 44 inches of water.
On November 14 Upper Darby normally reaches 56° and falls to 39°. The record high is 76°, in 1955; the record low 19°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 2.64 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1871 from the Philadelphia Area threaded record (Philadelphia International Airport, 5 miles south-southeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
