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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71° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1993. Next is 70° in 2022.
Wales’s center stands about 350 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 200 ft to 640 ft, a difference of 440 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Prospect, about 930 ft, 15 miles west.
The section below crosses 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 37×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Silurian, 428 to 434 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Late Ordovician to Silurian, 428 to 459 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Marble. Age: Silurian, 428 to 445 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Felsic-volcanic, mafic-volcanic. Age: Neoproterozoic to Ordovician, 445 to 1,000 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Schist, slate. Age: Silurian, 428 to 445 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Mudstone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 2 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 the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Jock Stream and the Kennebec: about 70 river miles.
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 79° in July; winter nights fall to about 7° in January. A normal year brings about 78 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 50 inches of water.
On November 14 Wales normally reaches 46° and falls to 27°. The record high is 64°, in 2010; the record low 6°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.02 in, fell in 2018.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1993 at Durham, 11 miles south, 210 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
