The Plympton 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
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
76° on Nov. 12, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1996. Next is 75° in 2020.
Plympton’s center stands about 130 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 30 ft to 180 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Pine Hills, about 410 ft, 12 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Rhode Island Formation (sandstone, graywacke), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
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.
Sandstone, graywacke. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Granite, gneiss, schist. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 8 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 Plympton reaches Narragansett Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Palmer Mill Brook, the Winnetuxet and the Taunton: about 40 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Plympton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Plympton has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. About 48 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Plympton normally reaches 53° and falls to 34°. The record high is 68°, in 2005; the record low 17°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.51 in, fell in 2000.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Plymouth Municipal Airport, 5 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
