The Falmouth 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.
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy; warmer
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79° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1995. Next is 79° in 2024.
Falmouth’s center stands about 90 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 20 ft to 300 ft, a difference of 280 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Hamiltons Thicket, about 480 ft, 14 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Potomac Formation (sand), from the Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old.
The section below crosses 12 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 49×. 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, silt. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Amphibolite. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 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.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 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. 6 smaller units 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 Falmouth reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Falls Run and the Rappahannock: about 110 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Falmouth; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Falmouth has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 25° in January. A normal year brings about 11 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 43 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1995 at Fredericksburg Sewage, 3 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
