The Fitchburg 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
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69° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1906. Next is 67° in 2022.
Fitchburg’s center stands about 460 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 350 ft to 1,040 ft, a difference of 690 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Wachusett Mountain, about 2,000 ft, 8 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Littleton Formation (schist, phyllite), from the Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 17×. 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, phyllite. Age: Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Granofels, schist. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Early Devonian to Late Devonian, 375 to 405 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Mica-schist. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary, muscovite-schist. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Early Devonian to Late Devonian, 375 to 405 million years old. About 0.7 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 Fitchburg reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of the North Nashua, the Nashua and the Merrimack: about 110 river miles.
55 miles of the trip are on the Merrimack.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Fitchburg; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Fitchburg has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° 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 49 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1906 at Ashburnham, 6 miles west-northwest, 650 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
