The Litchfield 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
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74° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1885. Next is 74° in 2022.
Litchfield’s center stands about 130 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 100 ft to 390 ft, a difference of 290 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is North Mountain, about 1,330 ft, 12 miles north-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Merrimack Group, Berwick Formation, Unnamed member (schist, granofels), from the Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 million years old.
The section below crosses 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 26×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granofels, biotite-schist. Age: Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 million years old. About 8 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 4 mi of the line.
Quartz-diorite, tonalite, granodiorite. Age: Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Silurian, 428 to 445 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 2 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 Litchfield reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Merrimack: about 60 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Litchfield; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Litchfield 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 Litchfield 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, 6 miles north-northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
