The Wellesley 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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77° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1962. Next is 76° in 1993.
Wellesley’s center stands about 150 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 80 ft to 320 ft, a difference of 240 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Great Blue Hill, about 630 ft, 11 miles east-southeast.
The section below crosses 14 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 36×. 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: Neoproterozoic, 615 to 645 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Metavolcanic. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Rhyolite. Age: Neoproterozoic, 599 to 605 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, tonalite. Age: Precambrian to Silurian. About 2 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Cambrian, 521 to 1,000 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 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. 8 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 Wellesley reaches Boston Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Waban Brook and the Charles: about 40 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Wellesley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Wellesley has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. About 49 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Wellesley normally reaches 53° and falls to 35°. The record high is 69°, in 1964; the record low 12°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.80 in, fell in 1988.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1962 at Jamaica Plain, 9 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
