The Onset 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
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
75° on Nov. 13, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1912. Next is 73° in 1993.
Onset’s center stands about 16 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 100 ft, a difference of 100 ft: gently rolling country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Pine Hills, about 410 ft, 13 miles north-northeast.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granite, gneiss, schist. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 14 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.
Rain that falls on Onset runs straight into the Atlantic Ocean.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Onset; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Onset has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 37 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 51 inches of water.
On November 14 Onset normally reaches 54° and falls to 35°. The record high is 72°, in 1959; the record low 16°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 2.05 in, fell in 1940.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1912 at East Wareham, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
