The Keene 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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12° on Nov. 17, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1872. Next is 12° in 2019.
Keene’s center stands about 910 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 810 ft to 1,020 ft, a difference of 210 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Lexington Limestone, from the Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 35×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 23 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 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.
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 Keene reaches the Gulf of America by way of Cave Spring Creek, Clear Creek, the Kentucky, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,510 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Keene; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Keene has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 25° in January. A normal year brings about 14 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 50 inches of water.
On November 14 Keene normally reaches 56° and falls to 37°. The record high is 77°, in 1971; the record low 15°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.52 in, fell in 1915.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1872 from the Lexington Area threaded record (Lexington Bluegrass Airport, 7 miles north-northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
