The Colonial Heights 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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21° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1979. Next is 22° in 2014.
Colonial Heights’s center stands about 100 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 200 ft, a difference of 200 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Windsor Formation (fine-detrital, coarse-detrital), from the Tertiary to Quaternary, less than 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 61×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Tertiary to Quaternary, less than 66 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Tertiary to Quaternary, less than 66 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand. Age: Pliocene, 2.6 to 5.3 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gravel. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 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. 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 Colonial Heights reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Oldtown Creek, the Appomattox and the James: about 85 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Colonial Heights; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Colonial Heights has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 47 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1979 at Petersburg, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
