The Smoaks 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.
89° on Nov. 11, 1945, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1903. Next is 88° in 1958.
Smoaks’s center stands about 110 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 90 ft to 170 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Duplin Formation (sand, clay), from the Pliocene, 2.6 to 5.3 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 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.
Sand, clay. Age: Pliocene, 2.6 to 5.3 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, limestone. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 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.
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 Smoaks reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of Buckhead Creek, the Little Salkehatchie, the Salkehatchie, the Combahee and the Coosaw: about 80 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Smoaks; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Smoaks has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 35° in January. About 51 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Smoaks normally reaches 68° and falls to 42°. The record high is 86°, in 1917; the record low 23°, in 1984. The most rain on this date, 1.22 in, fell in 1908.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1903 at Walterboro 1 SW, 16 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.