The Plainfield 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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6° on Nov. 12, 1976, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 7° in 1972.
Plainfield’s center stands about 530 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 300 ft to 1,290 ft, a difference of 990 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Ascutney, about 3,140 ft, 8 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Gile Mountain Formation - thick-bedded micaceous feldspathic quartzite member (mica-schist, quartzite), from the Early Devonian, 394 to 422 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 10×. 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, limestone. Age: Silurian to Early Devonian, 394 to 425 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Mica-schist, quartzite. Age: Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granite, granodiorite, trondhjemite. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Metavolcanic, metasedimentary. Age: Middle Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 445 to 471 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Quartzite, metasedimentary, muscovite-schist. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 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. 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 Plainfield reaches Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Bryant Brook and the Connecticut: about 210 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Plainfield; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Plainfield has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 9° in January. About 38 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Plainfield normally reaches 47° and falls to 28°. The record high is 66°, in 1973; the record low 9°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.11 in, fell in 2009.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Lebanon Municipal Airport, 7 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
