The Laurel 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
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Sunny
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Mostly sunny
5.51 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1996. The next wettest, 2.64 inches, fell in 2006.
Laurel’s center stands about 240 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 150 ft to 330 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pliocene Sand and Gravel (gravel, sand), from the Pliocene, 2.6 to 5.3 million years old.
The section below crosses 9 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 58×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Gravel, sand. Age: Pliocene, 2.6 to 5.3 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Tertiary to Quaternary, less than 66 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Mylonite, gneiss, cataclasite. Age: Proterozoic to Phanerozoic, less than 2,500 million 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. 3 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 Laurel reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of North Run, Upham Brook, the Chickahominy and the James: about 110 river miles.
65 miles of the trip are on the Chickahominy.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Laurel; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Laurel has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 46 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Laurel normally reaches 60° and falls to 38°. The record high is 79°, in 1999; the record low 20°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.83 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Ashland Hanover County Municipal Airport, 6 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
