The Adams 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.
Chance of showers
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−7° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1949. Next is 5° in 1972.
Adams’s center stands about 610 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 530 ft to 920 ft, a difference of 390 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Castor Hill, about 1,500 ft, 14 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Trenton Group (limestone), from the Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 13×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Siltstone, shale. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 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 Adams reaches Lake Ontario by way of Stony Creek: about 20 river miles. From the lake it goes down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Adams; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Adams has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about 10° in January. About 37 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Adams normally reaches 47° and falls to 30°. The record high is 68°, in 1994; the record low 13°, in 1996. The most rain on this date, 0.90 in, fell in 1985.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1949 at Watertown International Airport, 12 miles north, 300 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
