The Horseheads 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.
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
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Sunny; warmer
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Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
14° on Nov. 17, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1938. Next is 14° in 2019.
Horseheads’s center stands about 900 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 870 ft to 1,580 ft, a difference of 710 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Irish Hill, about 2,020 ft, 11 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Beers Hill, Dunn Hill, Millport, and Moreland Shales; Grimes Siltstone, from the Late Devonian, 359 to 384 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 18×. 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 14 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 1.0 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 Horseheads reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Newtown Creek, the Chemung and the Susquehanna: about 320 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Aldred.
250 miles of the trip are on the Susquehanna.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Horseheads; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Horseheads has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. About 32 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Horseheads normally reaches 50° and falls to 30°. The record high is 69°, in 1945; the record low 17°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.40 in, fell in 2011.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1938 at Elmira Corning Regional Airport, 4 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
