The Raritan 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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77° on Nov. 12, 1909, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1898. Next is 76° in 1973.
Raritan’s center stands about 660 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 130 ft to 700 ft, a difference of 570 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Fox Hill, about 1,040 ft, 14 miles north-northeast.
The section below crosses 17 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 23×. 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. Age: Late Triassic to Early Jurassic, 175 to 237 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Siltstone-mudstone, sandstone-mudstone. Age: Late Triassic, 202 to 237 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Conglomerate. Age: Late Jurassic, 145 to 164 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1.1 to 1.1 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Siltstone-mudstone, sandstone-mudstone. Age: Late Jurassic, 145 to 164 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Plutonic. Age: Jurassic, 145 to 202 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. 11 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 Raritan reaches New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Walnut Brook, the First Neshanic, the Neshanic, the South Branch Raritan and the Raritan: about 50 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Raritan; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Raritan has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. A normal year brings about 27 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 51 inches of water.
On November 14 Raritan normally reaches 54° and falls to 34°. The record high is 72°, in 1964; the record low 15°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.94 in, fell in 1940.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1898 at Flemington 5 NNW, 2 miles north-northeast, 400 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
