The St. Matthews 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.
Sunny
Sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
4.92 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1919. The next wettest, 3.24 inches, fell in 2009.
St. Matthews’s center stands about 290 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 210 ft to 370 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Neogene strata (undifferentiated) (sand, gravel), from the Tertiary Neogene to Quaternary, less than 23 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.
Clay, sand. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Tertiary Neogene to Quaternary, less than 23 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Pliocene, 2.6 to 5.3 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 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 St. Matthews reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of Halfway Swamp Creek, the Santee and the South Santee: about 130 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lib Pines Lake.
70 miles of the trip are on the Santee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of St. Matthews; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
St. Matthews has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. About 50 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 St. Matthews normally reaches 69° and falls to 44°. The record high is 83°, in 2005; the record low 23°, in 2013. The most rain on this date, 0.70 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1919 at Orangeburg 2, 13 miles south-southwest, 100 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
