The Folly Beach 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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84° on Nov. 15, 1955, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 84° in 1989.
Folly Beach’s center stands about 16 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 30 ft, a difference of 30 ft: nearly flat ground. Open water lies within three miles.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Beach (sand, gravel), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Peat. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 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.
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 Folly Beach reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of Folly Creek: about 5 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Folly Beach; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Folly Beach has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 44° in January. About 44 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Folly Beach normally reaches 67° and falls to 53°. The record high is 82°, in 1955; the record low 36°, in 1963. The most rain on this date, 2.56 in, fell in 1908.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Downtown Charleston, 8 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
