The Fairfield 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
78° on Nov. 15, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 72° in 2022.
Fairfield’s center stands about 20 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 240 ft, a difference of 240 ft: rolling country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Sunset Hill, about 840 ft, 15 miles north-northwest.
The section below crosses 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 28×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Schist, granofels. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Early Devonian to Middle Devonian, 393 to 419 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Schist, granofels. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Early Ordovician to Middle Ordovician, 459 to 487 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Schist. Age: Silurian to Devonian, 359 to 445 million 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. 2 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 Fairfield reaches Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Mill: about 4 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Fairfield; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Fairfield has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 25° in January. A normal year brings about 34 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 44 inches of water.
On November 14 Fairfield normally reaches 54° and falls to 39°. The record high is 68°, in 1959; the record low 20°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 2.84 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 from the Bridgeport Area threaded record (Igor I Sikorsky Memorial Airport, 7 miles east-northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
