The Chapel Hill 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
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
3.83 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1890. The next wettest, 3.35 inches, fell in 1915.
Chapel Hill’s center stands about 700 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 660 ft to 780 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Versailles Knob, about 1,290 ft, 11 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Stones River Group; Ridley Limestone, from the Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 43×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Limestone, calcarenite. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 0.4 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 Chapel Hill reaches the Gulf of America by way of Spring Creek, the Duck, the Tennessee, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,310 river miles.
Lake on the way: Pickwick Lake.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Chapel Hill; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Chapel Hill has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. About 56 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Chapel Hill normally reaches 63° and falls to 36°. The record high is 78°, in 1985; the record low 17°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 2.87 in, fell in 1915.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1890 at Lewisburg Experiment Sta, 16 miles south-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
