The Winchester 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; warmer
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.
Winchester’s center stands about 1,200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 700 ft to 1,470 ft, a difference of 770 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bradford Mountain, about 1,970 ft, 10 miles west-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Layered gneiss, from the Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old.
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 14×. 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.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Schist, granofels. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 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.
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 Winchester reaches Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Mad, the Still, the West Branch Farmington, the Farmington and the Connecticut: about 120 river miles.
55 miles of the trip are on the Connecticut.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Winchester; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Winchester 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 Winchester 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, 7 miles west-northwest, 140 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
