The Wales 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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73° on Nov. 16, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1962. Next is 73° in 2020.
Wales’s center stands about 950 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 670 ft to 1,210 ft, a difference of 540 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Burley Hill, about 1,320 ft, 4 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Partridge Formation (includes Brimfield Schist of Emerson, 1917) (mica-schist), from the Late Ordovician, 449 to 453 million years old.
The section below crosses 12 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.
Mica-schist. Age: Late Ordovician, 449 to 453 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Schist, phyllite. Age: Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Gneiss, amphibolite. Age: Late Ordovician to Silurian, 440 to 454 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granofels, schist. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granofels, schist. Age: Cambrian to Ordovician, 445 to 542 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. 6 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 Wales reaches Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Wales Brook, Mill Brook, the Quinebaug, the Shetucket and the Thames: about 95 river miles.
55 miles of the trip are on the Quinebaug.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Wales; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Wales has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. A normal year brings about 64 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 49 inches of water.
On November 14 Wales normally reaches 51° and falls to 32°. The record high is 69°, in 2010; the record low 12°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.97 in, fell in 2018.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1962 at East Brimfield Lake, 6 miles east-northeast, 250 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
