The Exeter 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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Partly cloudy; warmer
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74° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1973. Next is 74° in 2022.
Exeter’s center stands about 30 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 10 ft to 230 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is South Mountain, about 880 ft, 14 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Merrimack Group, Kittery Formation (metasandstone, phyllite), from the Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 38×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Metasandstone, phyllite. Age: Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Phyllite, quartzite, mica-schist. Age: Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Diorite, gabbro. Age: Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granofels, biotite-schist. Age: Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Tonalite, granodiorite. Age: Silurian, 422 to 428 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Schist, granofels. Age: Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 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. 1 smaller unit 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 Exeter reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of Norris Brook and the Piscataqua: about 20 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Exeter; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Exeter has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. A normal year brings about 65 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 51 inches of water.
On November 14 Exeter normally reaches 49° and falls to 32°. The record high is 71°, in 1989; the record low 10°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.90 in, fell in 2006.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1973 at Greenland, 7 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
