The Dickinson 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; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
76° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1983. Next is 72° in 2012.
Dickinson’s center stands about 740 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 440 ft to 1,190 ft, a difference of 750 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Azure Mountain, about 2,490 ft, 15 miles south-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Potsdam Sandstone, from the Cambrian, 487 to 497 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 12×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Amphibolite, gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 497 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Cambrian to Early Ordovician, 471 to 542 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 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.
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 Dickinson reaches the St. Lawrence River by way of Alburg Brook, Lawrence Brook, the Deer River, the Saint Regis and the Saint Lawrence: about 35 river miles. The St. Lawrence carries it on to the Atlantic.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Dickinson; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Dickinson has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 77° in July; winter nights fall to about 6° in January. A normal year brings about 98 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 Dickinson normally reaches 43° and falls to 28°. The record high is 66°, in 2005; the record low 0°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.59 in, fell in 2015.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1983 at Malone, 14 miles east-northeast, 140 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
