The Amherst 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
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
74° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1885. Next is 74° in 2022.
Amherst’s center stands about 270 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 220 ft to 680 ft, a difference of 460 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Pack Monadnock Mountain, about 2,270 ft, 13 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Massabesic Gneiss Complex (gneiss, biotite-schist, granofels), from the Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old.
The section below crosses 9 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 14×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Quartz-diorite, tonalite, granodiorite. Age: Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Gneiss, biotite-schist, granofels. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Schist, granofels. Age: Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Quartzite, metasedimentary. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granofels, biotite-schist. Age: Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Metagraywacke. Age: Early Devonian, 410 to 414 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. 3 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 Amherst reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of Beaver Brook, the Souhegan and the Merrimack: about 75 river miles.
60 miles of the trip are on the Merrimack.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Amherst; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Amherst has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. About 40 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Amherst normally reaches 51° and falls to 33°. The record high is 66°, in 2011; the record low 16°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.77 in, fell in 2009.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1885 from the Manchester Area threaded record (Manchester Airport, 11 miles east-northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
