The Orleans 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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70° on Nov. 12, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1996. Next is 66° in 2005.
Orleans’s center stands about 60 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 140 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country. Open water lies within three miles.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granite, gneiss, and schist, undivided (granite, gneiss, schist), from the Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old.
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 13 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 Orleans runs straight into the Atlantic Ocean.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Orleans; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Orleans has a oceanic climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. About 45 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Orleans normally reaches 52° and falls to 39°. The record high is 66°, in 2005; the record low 21°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.98 in, fell in 2000.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Chatham Municipal Airport, 7 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
