The Gaines 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
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
10° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1938. Next is 12° in 1986.
Gaines’s center stands about 430 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 340 ft to 530 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Nichols Hill, about 740 ft, 14 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Queenston Shale, from the Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 42×. 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. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 425 to 434 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Silurian, 428 to 445 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Silurian, 428 to 445 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Silurian, 434 to 445 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 Gaines reaches Lake Ontario by way of Marsh Creek: about 11 river miles. From the lake it goes down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Gaines; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Gaines has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 67 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 35 inches of water.
On November 14 Gaines normally reaches 50° and falls to 33°. The record high is 71°, in 1994; the record low 12°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.85 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1938 at Albion, 4 miles south, 170 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
