The Tompkins 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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4° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1944. Next is 8° in 1959.
Tompkins’s center stands about 920 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 900 ft to 1,070 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Teaspoon Hill, about 1,070 ft, 9 miles northeast.
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 4 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.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 18 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 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.
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 Tompkins reaches Lake Michigan by way of Sandstone Creek and the Grand River: about 200 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Tompkins; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Tompkins has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. About 32 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Tompkins normally reaches 48° and falls to 33°. The record high is 67°, in 1956; the record low 12°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.01 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1944 at Jackson Reynolds Field, 9 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
