The Glens Falls 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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70° on Nov. 15, 1956, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 69° in 1909.
Glens Falls’s center stands about 350 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 200 ft to 500 ft, a difference of 300 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Black Spruce Mountain, about 2,360 ft, 10 miles northwest.
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 11×. 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 7 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Biotite-gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 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.
Glens Falls straddles the St. Lawrence Divide. Rain on the southeast side runs to New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean; most of the rest goes to the St. Lawrence River.
From the center of town, a raindrop reaches the St. Lawrence River by way of Halfway Creek, Wood Creek, the Mettawee and the Richelieu: about 230 river miles. The St. Lawrence carries it on to the Atlantic. One that lands on the southeast side reaches New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Hudson: about 200 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Champlain.
90 miles of the trip are on the Mettawee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Glens Falls; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Glens Falls has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 10° in January. About 38 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Glens Falls normally reaches 47° and falls to 28°. The record high is 67°, in 1973; the record low 5°, in 1905. The most rain on this date, 1.45 in, fell in 2009.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the Glens Falls Area threaded record (Glens Falls/Floyd Bennett Memorial Airport, 3 miles northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
