The Belle Mead 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
Partly cloudy; warmer
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Sunny
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74° on Nov. 12, 2006, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1956. Next is 74° in 2020.
Belle Mead’s center stands about 110 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 70 ft to 580 ft, a difference of 510 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Cushetunk Mountain, about 880 ft, 13 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Passaic Formation (siltstone, shale), from the Early Jurassic to Late Jurassic, 145 to 202 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 32×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Siltstone, shale. Age: Early Jurassic to Late Jurassic, 145 to 202 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Plutonic. Age: Jurassic, 145 to 202 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Siltstone. Age: Late Triassic to Early Jurassic, 175 to 237 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Siltstone-mudstone, sandstone-mudstone. Age: Late Triassic, 202 to 237 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Siltstone-mudstone, sandstone. Age: Late Triassic to Early Jurassic, 175 to 237 million years old. About 0.3 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 Belle Mead reaches New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Pike Run, the Millstone and the Raritan: about 40 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Belle Mead; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Belle Mead has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 24 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 51 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1956 at Wertsville 4 NE, 7 miles west, 170 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
