The Salisbury 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.
Cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
70° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1884. Next is 67° in 1993.
Salisbury’s center stands about 790 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 640 ft to 1,860 ft, a difference of 1,220 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Everett, about 2,600 ft, 8 miles north.
The section below crosses 14 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 12×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Phyllite, schist. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Cambrian, 521 to 1,000 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Marble. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 497 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Schist, phyllite. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Schist, phyllite. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Schist. Age: Neoproterozoic to Cambrian, 487 to 1,000 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 8 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 Salisbury reaches Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Spruce Swamp Creek and the Housatonic: about 85 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Salisbury; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Salisbury 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 Salisbury 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, 11 miles east, 550 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
