The Grand Island 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
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78° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1982. Next is 72° in 2012.
Grand Island’s center stands about 600 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 560 ft to 650 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Camillus, Syracuse, and Vernon Formations (shale), from the Silurian, 422 to 428 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 49×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 425 to 434 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Silurian, 422 to 428 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Early Devonian to Middle Devonian, 388 to 410 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 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 Grand Island reaches Lake Ontario by way of Woods Creek and the Niagara: about 25 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 Grand Island; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Grand Island has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. A normal year brings about 80 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 Grand Island normally reaches 50° and falls to 31°. The record high is 68°, in 1994; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.88 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1982 at North Tonawanda, 6 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
