The Chester 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
72° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1926. Next is 71° in 2022.
Chester’s center stands about 600 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 560 ft to 1,610 ft, a difference of 1,050 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Haskell Hill, about 2,240 ft, 10 miles north-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Moretown Formation (granofels, schist), from the Early Ordovician to Middle Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old.
The section below crosses 12 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 11×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Schist. Age: Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Quartzite, mica-schist. Age: Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Mica-schist. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granofels, schist. Age: Early Ordovician to Middle Ordovician, 471 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. 6 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 Chester reaches Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the West Branch Westfield, the Westfield and the Connecticut: about 100 river miles.
75 miles of the trip are on the Connecticut.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Chester; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Chester has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. About 45 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Chester normally reaches 51° and falls to 31°. The record high is 66°, in 2011; the record low 11°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.44 in, fell in 1995.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1926 from the Westfield Area threaded record (Westfield-Barnes Regional Airport, 16 miles east-southeast, 340 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
