The Wakefield 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.
Sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Sunny
Sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
19° on Nov. 14, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1982. Next is 20° in 2014.
Wakefield’s center stands about 100 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 60 ft to 150 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Bacons Castle Formation (gravel), from the Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 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.
Gravel. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Tertiary to Quaternary, less than 66 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 0.4 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 Wakefield reaches Albemarle Sound and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Wildcat Swamp, Seacock Swamp, the Blackwater and the Chowan: about 100 river miles.
50 miles of the trip are on the Chowan.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Wakefield; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Wakefield has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. A normal year brings about 6 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 51 inches of water.
On November 14 Wakefield normally reaches 62° and falls to 38°. The record high is 78°, in 2007; the record low 19°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.30 in, fell in 1995.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1982 at Wakefield 1 NW, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
