The Hamilton 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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75° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1887. Next is 70° in 1909.
Hamilton’s center stands about 690 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 660 ft to 720 ft, a difference of 60 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Saginaw Formation (sandstone, shale), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. 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. Age: Jurassic, 145 to 202 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 9 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 Hamilton reaches Lake Huron by way of Potato Creek, the South Fork Bad, the Bad River, the Shiawassee and the Saginaw: about 55 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Often dry. About 30% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Hamilton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Hamilton has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. A normal year brings about 39 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 34 inches of water.
On November 14 Hamilton normally reaches 46° and falls to 30°. The record high is 67°, in 1989; the record low 9°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.25 in, fell in 1927.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1887 at Alma, 15 miles northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
