The Jay 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
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
1° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1945. Next is 10° in 1986.
Jay’s center stands about 710 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 610 ft to 1,820 ft, a difference of 1,210 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Whiteface Mountain, about 4,820 ft, 9 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Metanorthosite and anorthositic gneiss (gneiss, metaanorthosite), from the Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 6×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Gneiss, metaanorthosite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 19 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Charnockite, gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Anorthosite, metasedimentary. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary, migmatite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 0.9 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 Jay reaches the St. Lawrence River by way of the East Branch Ausable, the Ausable and the Richelieu: about 140 river miles. The St. Lawrence carries it on to the Atlantic.
Lake on the way: Lake Champlain.
80 miles of the trip are on the Richelieu.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Jay; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Jay has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 10° in January. About 31 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Jay normally reaches 46° and falls to 29°. The record high is 64°, in 1959; the record low 11°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.88 in, fell in 2009.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1945 from the Plattsburgh Area threaded record (Plattsburgh International Airport, 22 miles northeast, 540 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
