The Clifton Park 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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Partly cloudy; warmer
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74° on Nov. 15, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1874. Next is 73° in 1928.
Clifton Park’s center stands about 350 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 220 ft to 410 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Rafinesque, about 1,180 ft, 9 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Canajoharie Shale (black-shale), from the Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 22×. 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 15 mi of the line.
Graywacke, shale. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Graywacke, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, conglomerate, limestone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Cambrian, 521 to 1,000 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Slate, shale. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 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. 1 smaller unit 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 Clifton Park reaches New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Stony Creek, the Mohawk and the Hudson: about 180 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Clifton Park; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Clifton Park has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. A normal year brings about 59 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 41 inches of water.
On November 14 Clifton Park normally reaches 50° and falls to 32°. The record high is 70°, in 1973; the record low 12°, in 1996. The most rain on this date, 1.79 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1874 from the Albany Area threaded record (Albany International Airport, 8 miles south). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
