The South Ashburnham 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
69° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1906. Next is 67° in 2022.
South Ashburnham’s center stands about 1,000 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 830 ft to 1,320 ft, a difference of 490 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Burton Peak, about 2,010 ft, 14 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Paxton Formation (mica-schist), from the Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old.
The section below crosses 9 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 20×. 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. Age: Early Devonian to Late Devonian, 375 to 405 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Schist, phyllite. Age: Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Mica-schist. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Mica-schist. Age: Late Ordovician, 449 to 453 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granite, pegmatite. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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. 3 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 South Ashburnham reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Whitman, the North Nashua, the Nashua and the Merrimack: about 120 river miles.
55 miles of the trip are on the Merrimack.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of South Ashburnham; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
South Ashburnham has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about 14° in January. A normal year brings about 75 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 49 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1906 at Ashburnham, here, 110 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
