The Highlands 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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77° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1950. Next is 69° in 2022.
Highlands’s center stands about 1,150 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 30 ft to 1,400 ft, a difference of 1,370 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is South Beacon Mountain, about 1,580 ft, 8 miles north-northeast.
The section below crosses 13 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 14×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granite, gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Melange. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Late Triassic, 202 to 237 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Biotite-gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion 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. 7 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 Highlands reaches New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Long Pond Brook and the Hudson: about 55 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Highlands; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Highlands has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. About 50 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Highlands normally reaches 53° and falls to 32°. The record high is 68°, in 1964; the record low 17°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.18 in, fell in 1955.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1950 at Shrub Oak, 9 miles east-southeast, 690 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
