The Boston 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
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
78° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 72° in 2012.
Boston’s center stands about 950 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 880 ft to 1,650 ft, a difference of 770 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Blue Hill, about 2,040 ft, 14 miles southeast.
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 15×. 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, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 18 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 0.7 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 Boston reaches Lake Erie by way of Eighteenmile Creek: about 20 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Boston; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Boston has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. A normal year brings about 109 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 44 inches of water.
On November 14 Boston normally reaches 48° and falls to 31°. The record high is 67°, in 2010; the record low 8°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.66 in, fell in 1992.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Wales, 12 miles east-northeast, 180 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
