The Staples 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.
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78° on Nov. 15, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 72° in 2022.
Staples’s center stands about 180 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 300 ft, a difference of 300 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Barlow Mountain, about 970 ft, 15 miles northwest.
The section below crosses 9 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 26×. 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: Early Devonian to Middle Devonian, 393 to 419 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Schist, granofels. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Early Ordovician to Middle Ordovician, 459 to 487 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, granofels. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 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. 3 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 Staples reaches Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Muddy Brook: about 3 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Staples; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Staples 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 Staples 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, 10 miles east, 170 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
