The Salisbury 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
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
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11° on Nov. 16, 1996, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1992. Next is 14° in 2019.
Salisbury’s center stands about 30 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 150 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Pine Knoll, about 420 ft, 14 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Newburyport Complex (tonalite, granodiorite), from the Middle Ordovician to Silurian, 440 to 470 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 52×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Tonalite, granodiorite. Age: Middle Ordovician to Silurian, 440 to 470 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Phyllite, quartzite, mica-schist. Age: Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granofels, biotite-schist. Age: Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Phyllite. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Phyllite. Age: Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 million years old. About 0.3 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 Salisbury reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Merrimack: about 2 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Salisbury; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Salisbury has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. A normal year brings about 67 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 49 inches of water.
On November 14 Salisbury normally reaches 51° and falls to 32°. The record high is 69°, in 1993; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.55 in, fell in 2009.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1992 at Groveland, 11 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
