The Madison 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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77° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1959. Next is 72° in 2022.
Madison’s center stands about 600 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 470 ft to 1,430 ft, a difference of 960 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Passaconaway, about 4,070 ft, 12 miles west-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Littleton Formation, undivided (metagraywacke), from the Early Devonian, 410 to 414 million years old.
The section below crosses 10 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 7×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Quartzite. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Early Jurassic to Middle Jurassic, 164 to 202 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 359 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Middle Jurassic to Late Jurassic, 145 to 175 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Metagraywacke. Age: Early Devonian, 410 to 414 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Mudstone, limestone. Age: Silurian to Devonian, 359 to 445 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 4 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 Madison reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of Pequawket Brook and the Saco: about 100 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Madison; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Madison has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 10° in January. A normal year brings about 84 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 50 inches of water.
On November 14 Madison normally reaches 47° and falls to 28°. The record high is 63°, in 1985; the record low 8°, in 1971. The most rain on this date, 0.85 in, fell in 2018.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1959 at North Conway, 11 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
