The Lee 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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70° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1949. Next is 66° in 1956.
Lee’s center stands about 940 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 530 ft to 1,220 ft, a difference of 690 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Penn Mountain, about 1,860 ft, 14 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pulaski and Whetstone Gulf Formations (siltstone, shale), from the Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million 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 15×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Siltstone, shale. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 18 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Ordovician to Silurian, 434 to 459 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Silurian, 434 to 445 million years old. About 0.3 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.
Lee straddles the St. Lawrence Divide. Rain on the east side runs to New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean; most of the rest goes to Lake Ontario.
From the center of town, a raindrop reaches Lake Ontario by way of Canada Creek, Wood Creek, the Oneida and the Oswego: about 90 river miles. From the lake it goes down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic. One that lands on the east side reaches New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Big Gulf, Potash Creek, the Mohawk and the Hudson: about 290 river miles.
Lake on the way: Oneida Lake.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lee; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lee has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 75° in July; winter nights fall to about 8° in January. A normal year brings about 164 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 58 inches of water.
On November 14 Lee normally reaches 42° and falls to 26°. The record high is 61°, in 2010; the record low −1°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.95 in, fell in 1961.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1949 at Boonville 4 SSW, 11 miles northeast, 610 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
