The Melrose Park 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.
75° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1897. Next is 72° in 1902.
Melrose Park’s center stands about 750 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 640 ft to 970 ft, a difference of 330 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Oak Hill, about 1,360 ft, 12 miles south-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Marcellus Formation (black-shale), from the Middle Devonian, 388 to 394 million years old.
The section below crosses 10 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: Silurian, 422 to 428 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Middle Devonian, 388 to 394 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 428 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 388 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 4 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 Melrose Park reaches Lake Ontario by way of Owasco Lake, the Owasco, the Seneca and the Oswego: about 85 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 Melrose Park; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Melrose Park has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. A normal year brings about 109 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 44 inches of water.
On November 14 Melrose Park normally reaches 48° and falls to 32°. The record high is 72°, in 1902; the record low 8°, in 1905. The most rain on this date, 0.50 in, fell in 1901.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1897 at Auburn, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.