The Great Barrington 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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74° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1996. Next is 68° in 2002.
Great Barrington’s center stands about 710 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 670 ft to 1,730 ft, a difference of 1,060 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Everett, about 2,600 ft, 7 miles south-southwest.
The section below crosses 18 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 13×. 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 4 mi of the line.
Marble. Age: Early Cambrian, 521 to 542 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Slate, phyllite, schist. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Marble. Age: Early Cambrian, 521 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. 12 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 Great Barrington reaches Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Housatonic: about 100 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Great Barrington; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Great Barrington has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 13° in January. About 49 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Great Barrington normally reaches 47° and falls to 28°. The record high is 68°, in 2010; the record low 8°, in 1996. The most rain on this date, 0.87 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Lenox Dale, 11 miles north-northeast, 290 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
