The Canaan 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 cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
70° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1884. Next is 67° in 1993.
Canaan’s center stands about 670 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 640 ft to 1,780 ft, a difference of 1,140 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Everett, about 2,600 ft, 12 miles northwest.
The section below crosses 16 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 13×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Gneiss, quartzite. Age: Early Cambrian, 521 to 542 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Schist. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Marble. Age: Middle Cambrian to Cambrian, 487 to 521 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. 10 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 Canaan reaches Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Ledgy Brook, Wangum Lake Brook, the Hollenbeck and the Housatonic: about 85 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Canaan; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Canaan has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 78° in July; winter nights fall to about 14° in January. A normal year brings about 75 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 53 inches of water.
On November 14 Canaan normally reaches 46° and falls to 31°. The record high is 64°, in 1964; the record low 10°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.92 in, fell in 1988.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1884 at Norfolk 2 SW, 4 miles east, 670 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
