The Kittery 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
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74° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1973. Next is 74° in 2022.
Kittery’s center stands about 50 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 140 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Agamenticus, about 690 ft, 10 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Silurian - Precambrian Z Kittery Formation (metasandstone, phyllite), from the Neoproterozoic to Silurian, 422 to 1,000 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 62×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Metasandstone, phyllite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Silurian, 422 to 1,000 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss, quartzite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Ordovician, 445 to 1,000 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Phyllite, quartzite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Silurian, 422 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.
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 Kittery reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of Hill Creek and Spruce Creek: about 2 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Kittery; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Kittery 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 65 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 51 inches of water.
On November 14 Kittery normally reaches 49° and falls to 32°. The record high is 71°, in 1989; the record low 10°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.90 in, fell in 2006.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1973 at Greenland, 6 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
