The East Kingston 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.
76° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1963. Next is 74° in 1993.
East Kingston’s center stands about 170 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 80 ft to 280 ft, a difference of 200 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is South Mountain, about 880 ft, 15 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Merrimack Group, Eliot Formation (phyllite, quartzite, mica-schist), from the Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 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 35×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Phyllite, quartzite, mica-schist. Age: Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Granofels, biotite-schist. Age: Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Metasandstone, phyllite. Age: Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss, quartzite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Ordovician, 445 to 1,000 million years old. About 3 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 East Kingston reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of Great Brook, the Exeter and the Piscataqua: about 25 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of East Kingston; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
East Kingston has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 14° in January. A normal year brings about 57 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 46 inches of water.
On November 14 East Kingston normally reaches 50° and falls to 30°. The record high is 72°, in 1989; the record low 7°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.25 in, fell in 2006.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1963 at Epping, 8 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.