The Front Royal 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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78° on Nov. 11, 2006, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1995. Next is 75° in 1999.
Front Royal’s center stands about 570 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 470 ft to 1,670 ft, a difference of 1,200 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Hogback Mountain, about 3,470 ft, 12 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Beekmantown Group (dolostone, 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 7×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Granulite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Metabasalt. Age: Neoproterozoic to Cambrian, 487 to 1,000 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Leucocratic-granitic. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 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 Front Royal reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Happy Creek, the Shenandoah and the Potomac: about 230 river miles.
180 miles of the trip are on the Potomac.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Front Royal; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Front Royal has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. A normal year brings about 21 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 43 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1995 at Front Royal, here, 360 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
