The Guilford 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.
75° on Nov. 12, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 70° in 2024.
Guilford’s center stands about 40 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 250 ft, a difference of 250 ft: rolling country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Beseck Mountain, about 860 ft, 15 miles north-northwest.
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 29×. 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, amphibolite. Age: Early Ordovician to Middle Ordovician, 459 to 487 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Gneiss, granite, quartzite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Permian, 252 to 1,000 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gneiss, granofels. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
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 Guilford reaches Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the West River: about 7 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Guilford; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Guilford has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. About 42 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Guilford normally reaches 54° and falls to 36°. The record high is 69°, in 1959; the record low 20°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.19 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at New Haven Tweed Airport, 11 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.