The Bowling Green 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.
5.00 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1959. The next wettest, 4.23 inches, fell in 2009.
Bowling Green’s center stands about 230 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 90 ft to 280 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Chesapeake Group (sand), from the Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 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. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand. Age: Pliocene, 2.6 to 5.3 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Tertiary to Quaternary, less than 66 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 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. 1 smaller unit 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 Bowling Green reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Maracossic Creek, the Mattaponi and the York: about 110 river miles.
55 miles of the trip are on the Mattaponi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bowling Green; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bowling Green has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. A normal year brings about 12 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 45 inches of water.
On November 14 Bowling Green normally reaches 59° and falls to 37°. The record high is 78°, in 1985; the record low 14°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.94 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1959 at Corbin, 10 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.