The Montpelier 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 sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
72° on Nov. 13, 1939, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1881. Next is 70° in 1905.
Montpelier’s center stands about 1,380 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,350 ft to 1,500 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pierre Formation (shale), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
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: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 24 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 Montpelier reaches the Gulf of America by way of the James, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,520 river miles.
Lake on the way: Columbia Road Reservoir.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Montpelier; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Montpelier has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 1° in January. A normal year brings about 46 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 21 inches of water.
On November 14 Montpelier normally reaches 38° and falls to 20°. The record high is 68°, in 2001; the record low −12°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.34 in, fell in 1928.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1881 at Jamestown State Hosp, 14 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
