The Chatham 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. 15, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1957. Next is 72° in 1964.
Chatham’s center stands about 470 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 280 ft to 950 ft, a difference of 670 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Lenox Mountain, about 2,120 ft, 15 miles east.
The section below crosses 12 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 9×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Slate, phyllite, schist. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, conglomerate, limestone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Phyllite. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Graywacke, shale. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Cambrian, 521 to 1,000 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Slate, shale. Age: Ordovician, 445 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. 6 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 Chatham reaches New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Stony Kill, Kinderhook Creek and the Hudson: about 140 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Chatham; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Chatham has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 31 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 44 inches of water.
On November 14 Chatham normally reaches 52° and falls to 34°. The record high is 71°, in 1989; the record low 14°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.20 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1957 at Hudson Correctional Facility, 13 miles southwest, 440 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
