The Whitman 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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79° on Nov. 12, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is 78° in 1993.
Whitman’s center stands about 130 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 70 ft to 210 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Great Blue Hill, about 630 ft, 13 miles northwest.
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 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 58×. 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 14 mi of the line.
Granite, gneiss, schist. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Neoproterozoic, 615 to 645 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 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.
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 Whitman reaches Narragansett Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Meadow Brook, the Matfield and the Taunton: about 45 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Whitman; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Whitman has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. A normal year brings about 34 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 50 inches of water.
On November 14 Whitman normally reaches 54° and falls to 35°. The record high is 74°, in 1993; the record low 14°, in 1905. The most rain on this date, 2.07 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 at Brockton, 4 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
