The Smithfield 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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85° on Nov. 15, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 83° in 1955.
Smithfield’s center stands about 30 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 110 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Shirley Formation (fine-detrital, coarse-detrital), from the Quaternary, less than 2.6 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 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.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Tertiary to Quaternary, less than 66 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.9 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 Smithfield reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Cypress Creek, the Pagan and the James: about 20 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Smithfield; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Smithfield has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 32° in January. About 48 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Smithfield normally reaches 61° and falls to 42°. The record high is 79°, in 1993; the record low 28°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.32 in, fell in 1908.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Langley Air Force Base, 16 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
