The German Flatts 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. 11, 1948, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 73° in 1956.
German Flatts’s center stands about 1,090 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 380 ft to 1,550 ft, a difference of 1,170 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Rum Hill, about 2,120 ft, 13 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Frankfort Formation (siltstone, shale), from the Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old.
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 13×. 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 Devonian, 388 to 394 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Siltstone, shale. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Cambrian to Early Ordovician, 471 to 497 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Early Devonian to Middle Devonian, 388 to 410 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 German Flatts reaches New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Fulmer Creek, the Mohawk and the Hudson: about 250 river miles.
160 miles of the trip are on the Hudson.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of German Flatts; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
German Flatts has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 73° in July; winter nights fall to about 14° in January. A normal year brings about 86 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 48 inches of water.
On November 14 German Flatts normally reaches 40° and falls to 30°. The record high is 70°, in 1989; the record low 9°, in 1939. The most rain on this date, 0.95 in, fell in 1949.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Cooperstown, 19 miles south, 170 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
