The Groton 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.
Showers likely
Chance of showers; warmer
Mostly cloudy
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
73° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 67° in 2012.
Groton’s center stands about 1,150 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 960 ft to 1,560 ft, a difference of 600 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Virgil Mountain, about 2,130 ft, 13 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Genesee Group (shale), from the Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old.
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.
Shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 23 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 Groton reaches Lake Ontario by way of Owasco Inlet, the Owasco, the Seneca and the Oswego: about 110 river miles. From the lake it goes down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Lake on the way: Owasco Lake.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Groton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Groton has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about 12° in January. A normal year brings about 64 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Freeville 1 NE, 5 miles south-southeast, 110 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
