The Alma 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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Sunny
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74° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1956. Next is 69° in 2012.
Alma’s center stands about 1,550 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,520 ft to 2,500 ft, a difference of 980 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Alma Hill, about 2,570 ft, 3 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Conneaut Group, undivided (shale, sandstone), from the Late Devonian, 359 to 384 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 18×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Siltstone, shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 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.
Alma straddles the St. Lawrence Divide. Rain on the northeast side runs to Lake Ontario; most of the rest goes to the Gulf of America.
From the center of town, a raindrop reaches the Gulf of America by way of Honeoye Creek, Oswayo Creek, the Allegheny, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 2,230 river miles. One that lands on the northeast side reaches Lake Ontario by way of Ford Brook and the Genesee: about 150 river miles. From the lake it goes down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Lake on the way: Allegheny Reservoir.
970 miles of the trip are on the Ohio.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Alma; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Alma has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about 13° in January. A normal year brings about 54 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1956 at Wellsville, 9 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
