The Ames 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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74° on Nov. 11, 1948, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 73° in 1956.
Ames’s center stands about 710 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 660 ft to 1,440 ft, a difference of 780 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Pine Mountain, about 2,370 ft, 13 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Utica Shale (black-shale), from the Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 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.
Black-shale. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Middle Devonian, 388 to 394 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Cambrian to Early Ordovician, 471 to 497 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 2 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 Ames reaches New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Brimstone Creek, Canajoharie Creek, the Mohawk and the Hudson: about 230 river miles.
160 miles of the trip are on the Hudson.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Ames; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ames has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 73° in July; winter nights fall to about 14° in January. A normal year brings about 86 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 48 inches of water.
On November 14 Ames normally reaches 40° and falls to 30°. The record high is 70°, in 1989; the record low 9°, in 1939. The most rain on this date, 0.95 in, fell in 1949.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Cooperstown, 18 miles west-southwest, 550 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
