The Oswego 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
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Mostly sunny; warmer
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73° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1926. Next is 70° in 1928.
Oswego’s center stands about 310 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 240 ft to 440 ft, a difference of 200 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bristol Hill, about 540 ft, 12 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Oswego Sandstone, from the Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. 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, 434 to 445 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Ordovician to Silurian, 434 to 459 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 2 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.
Rain that falls on Oswego runs straight into Lake Ontario. From the lake it goes down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Oswego; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Oswego has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 140 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 43 inches of water.
On November 14 Oswego normally reaches 48° and falls to 36°. The record high is 68°, in 1994; the record low 16°, in 1996. The most rain on this date, 0.85 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1926 from the Oswego Area threaded record (Oswego, here). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
